Using Lombok in a Java Spring Boot Project

Learn how to integrate Lombok seamlessly into your Spring Boot applications to simplify entity classes, reduce getter/setter code. Enhance your development productivity and write cleaner, more concise code with the step-by-step instructions and practical examples provided in this tutorial.

To use Lombok in a Java Spring Boot project, follow these steps:

1. Ensure that Lombok is installed in your development environment. If Lombok is not already installed in your Eclipse, you can refer to the installation process provided here.
2. Open your Java Spring Boot project in your eclipse IDE.
3. Add the Lombok dependency to your project's build configuration file (e.g., Maven's pom.xml or Gradle's build.gradle). Include the following dependency:



For Maven:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.projectlombok</groupId>
    <artifactId>lombok</artifactId>
    <version>1.18.28</version>
    <scope>provided</scope>
</dependency>




For Gradle:

compileOnly group: 'org.projectlombok', name: 'lombok', version: '1.18.28'



4. Build your project to ensure the dependency is downloaded and available.



Now, you can start using Lombok in your Spring Boot project. Lombok provides various annotations to reduce boilerplate code and enhance productivity. Annotate your classes, fields, or methods with Lombok annotations, such as @Getter, @Setter, @NoArgsConstructor, @AllArgsConstructor, etc., to automatically generate the corresponding code during compilation.

For example, you can annotate a class with @Data to generate getters, setters, equals(), hashCode(), and toString() methods:

import lombok.Data;
import lombok.Builder.Default;

@Data
public class Example {

    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private int age;

    @Default
    private boolean deleted = false;

    @Default
    private List hobbies = new ArrayList<>();

}

Lombok will automatically generate the getter and setter methods for the firstName, lastName and age fields.

You should use Lombok annotations appropriately to enhance code readability and maintainability in your Spring Boot project.