Before getting into creating our first Spring Boot application, let us download the Spring Tool Suite (STS) IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which will help us to develop spring based applications quickly by provided numerous support features such as auto-complete, configuration and import wizards etc. for Spring Framework based applications. The Spring Tool Suite setup guide will walk you through downloading and setting up the IDE in your machine.
Download STS
- Visit https://spring.io/tools/sts/all which lists out all available versions of STS based on your OS.
- Click on the link related to your OS to download the ZIP file as shown in the below image. In this tutorial we have downloaded the Windows 64 bit version of STS. The download size will usually be around 400 MB and will be downloaded to your default download location.
Spring Tool Suite Setup
- The STS is a ZIP package and not a standalone installer. So there is no need to follow any installation process in-order to open the program.
- Extract the downloaded ZIP file to your desired path. The Folder will contain three sub-folders as legal, pivotal-tc-server and sts-x.x.x.RELEASE.
- Open the sts-x.x.x.RELEASE folder (where x.x.x will the version of STS that you downloaded) and open STS.exe. The contents of the folder is shown below.
- Additionally you can create a shortcut in your desktop to the STS.exe or pin to to the task bar or start menu for easy access as shown below.
