Dev Services for Spring Boot Using Arconia

Summary

Have you ever felt the pain of setting up local infrastructure for a Spring Boot application? Perhaps you've struggled with configuring a PostgreSQL database, an OpenTelemetry collector, or even an AI inference service like Ollama. Whether you're using Docker Compose or Testcontainers for defining the external services your application depends on, the process can involve a lot of boilerplate code, manual configuration, and changes to your development workflow.Before you can even start coding the business logic, you might find yourself spending time with preliminary tasks that detract from your productivity. If you bootstrap new applications often, you'll have to repeat these steps each time, risking being trapped in a cycle of copying and pasting boilerplate code from one project to another. And if you're just getting started with Spring Boot, all this setup can feel even more overwhelming.Wouldn't it be great if you could just add a dependency to your application project and have everything work out of the box? That's exactly what Arconia Dev Services bring to the table.In this article, I'll present the main features of Arconia Dev Services and how they can transform your local development experience. Then, I'll walk you through how to use Arconia Dev Services to provide a PostgreSQL database when running a Spring Boot application with Spring Data JDBC and Flyway. You'll see how easy it is to get started without any boilerplate code or extra configuration.🚀Developer experience is one of my focus areas. I've been working on a new book about it together with my friend Mauricio Salatino, who I thank for the insightful conversations and feedback on the subject. You can already check out Developer Experience on Kubernetes in the early release version here.What is Arconia?Arconia is an open-source framework that acts as an add-on for Spring Boot. I created Arconia to enhance the development of modern enterprise applications with Java. You can add Arconia to an existing S...