Setup

This page installs BootUI in a Spring Boot Spring MVC application. On WebFlux, the starter is the same; follow BootUI on Spring WebFlux. On Quarkus, follow BootUI on Quarkus. All three serve the same console and the same JSON contract.

Prerequisites

• Java 17 or later
• Spring Boot 4.x application on spring-boot-starter-web (or spring-boot-starter-webmvc)
• Maven or Gradle (or their local wrappers)

Add the starter dependency

Adding the starter is the whole install. BootUI ships dormant: it activates in the dev and local profiles, or when spring-boot-devtools is on the classpath, and stays off in prod and production.

The starter brings no web stack of its own. Your application's spring-boot-starter-web keeps it a servlet application on Tomcat, and BootUI binds to Spring MVC; a WebFlux application keeps spring-boot-starter-webflux and the same starter binds to WebFlux. An application with neither starts no web server, and BootUI stays off.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.julien-dubois.bootui</groupId>
  <artifactId>bootui-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
  <version>2.1.0</version>
</dependency>

// Groovy DSL (build.gradle)
runtimeOnly 'com.julien-dubois.bootui:bootui-spring-boot-starter:2.1.0'

// Kotlin DSL (build.gradle.kts)
runtimeOnly("com.julien-dubois.bootui:bootui-spring-boot-starter:2.1.0")

To keep the starter jar out of your production artifact, declare it in a dev-only build profile instead. See Activation and safety.

Run your app in development mode

Start the application with the dev profile active so BootUI turns on:

./mvnw spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.profiles=dev

./gradlew bootRun --args='--spring.profiles.active=dev'

BootUI also activates when spring-boot-devtools is on the classpath. To decide explicitly instead of relying on the AUTO default, set bootui.enabled:

bootui.enabled=ON

The prod and production profiles disable BootUI unless bootui.enabled=ON is set. An unrecognized value fails closed and leaves BootUI disabled.

Open the console

BootUI is now available at http://localhost:8080/bootui.

Use a custom path

To move the console, set bootui.path:

bootui.path=/dev-console

The UI is then served at /dev-console, and the API, streams, downloads, writes, and MCP endpoint move to /dev-console/api/**. The old /bootui mount returns 404; it is not kept as an alias.

To serve the API from a separate mount, set bootui.api-path as well:

bootui.path=/dev-console
bootui.api-path=/internal/bootui-api

Both paths are application-relative. A servlet context path, a WebFlux base path, or a Quarkus HTTP root path is composed automatically, so server.servlet.context-path=/host with bootui.path=/dev-console produces /host/dev-console. The UI receives the browser-visible paths at runtime, so no frontend rebuild is needed.

What to read next

Everything below is optional.