Spring boot without a web container

I really like spring boot a lot - just throw in some dependencies and BAM it’s configured right out of the box.

For a pet project of mine, I’m consuming a REST API. So I included the spring-boot-starter-web artificact.

Not so surprisingly, the logs showed Tomcat was booting. In this particular project, I don’t need tomcat or any other web container for that matter. So how to exclude this?

My first guess was the application properties, but there was nothing to turn the web container on or off. And then I remembered:

Whatever is found in the classpath will be configured

spring-boot-starter-web depends on:

• Core spring
• Web MVC
• Jackson
• Validation
• Embedded container - tomcat
• Logging

So disabling Tomcat comes down to excluding it in the pom file:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
  <exclusions>
      <exclusion>
          <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
          <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
      </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>