Development Environment Setup

Let’s set up our development environment.

Java

To build the blog app you’re going to need Java 21 or later.

You can check your Java version by opening up a terminal or a command prompt and typing:

If you see an earlier version then I’d recommend heading over to oracle.com to download JDK 21 or later.

Or if you prefer to use an open source JDK, then you can download it from Adoptium, which is a part of the Eclipse Foundation.

Either JDK should work for this project.

Maven

We’ll be using Apache Maven to manage our project, although you’ll not need to install this on your system as an instance of Maven will come bundled with your skeleton Spring Boot project, but more on that later.

Node

To run the frontend code I’ll provide, you’ll need Node version 20 or later.

You can check your Node version by opening up a terminal or a command prompt and typing:

Note it’s two dashes before “version” for node, but only one for Java.

If you don’t have the required version then head over to nodejs.org to download a later version of node.

Docker

To run the PostgreSQL database we’ll be using later you’ll need docker installed on your machine.

To check you have docker installed, open up a terminal or command prompt and type:

You get a version number printed out, otherwise head over to docker.com to download docker.

IDE

I’m going to be using the community version of IntelliJ IDEA as the IDE for this project.

You can use any IDE you like, such as Visual Studio Code, but I recommend IntelliJ as it’s brilliant for Java development.

You can download IntelliJ for free from the JetBrains website.

Summary

• You’ll need JDK 21 or later.

• We’ll be using Maven, but you don’t need to install this.

• You’ll need Node V20 or later to run the frontend.

• You’ll need Docker installed in order to easily run PostgreSQL.

• You’ll need an IDE, I recommend IntelliJ IDEA.

With everything installed, let’s check out the requirements of what we are going to be building.