Maven如何在Spring Tool Suite中自动从父pom.xml继承属性

Question

I am not sure whether I have understood inheritance in Maven pom.xml correctly or not. From my understanding I have to define common properties in Parent pom.xml , then in Child project those properties can be inherited.

My confusion started when I created a new Maven project using Spring Tool Suite IDE. I created a project through File → New → Spring Started Project. I got the base folder structure created for Maven with default pom.xml . When I analysed the default pom.xml , it has the following parent tag:

<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.5.7.RELEASE</version>
    <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>

I have not defined any parent pom.xml . I am wondering from which parent pom the above attributes are reference?

Note: I am using STS embedded Maven.

Answer 1

As you can see, the maven artifact spring-boot-starter-parent from the group org.springframework.boot in version 1.5.7.RELEASE is set to be your parent. The same way a dependency would be searched for, the parent is searched for... so you probably don't have this parent in your local maven repository, so maven central is called (the same way maven central would be called to find slf4j, hibernate or any other referenced dependency).