It could be a silly question, but I searched online and wasn’t able to find any details on the difference of spring-boot-actuator and spring-boot-starter-actuator.
The difference between spring-boot-actuator and spring-boot-starter-actuator lies primarily in their purposes and usage within a Spring Boot application. Here’s a breakdown of each:
- Spring Boot Actuator:
- Purpose: The Actuator module provides tools to help you monitor and manage your Spring Boot application. It includes several production-ready features such as health checks, metrics gathering, and HTTP tracing, among others.
- Functions: By including this module, you have the ability to interact with your Spring Boot application through various endpoints like
/actuator/health,/actuator/info,/actuator/metrics, etc. These endpoints can give you valuable insights into the application’s current state and performance. - Standalone Module: In terms of Maven or Gradle dependency,
spring-boot-actuatoris a standalone library that you can include directly in your project if you specifically want to leverage its capabilities without using a starter.
- Spring Boot Starter Actuator:
- Purpose: This is a starter dependency that aggregates all the necessary dependencies and auto-configuration for using Spring Boot Actuator seamlessly.
- Convenience: The primary role of
spring-boot-starter-actuatoris to provide an easy, one-stop solution to get started with Actuator features in a Spring Boot application. This starter simplifies the process of including the Actuator module alongside any additional auto-configuration necessary to get up and running quickly. - Includes spring-boot-actuator: When you add
spring-boot-starter-actuatorto your project, it automatically includesspring-boot-actuatoralong with any other required dependencies and configurations.
In summary, if you’re using a Spring Boot Starter, it’s primarily for convenience and to ensure that you have all necessary configurations and dependencies for Actuator available out-of-the-box. If you prefer to manually control which dependencies are included, you might opt for using spring-boot-actuator directly. However, the most common practice is to use spring-boot-starter-actuator for ease of setup.