When we build applications using Spring Boot, there are a couple of situations that are possible:

• We want to run the applications in place without building a JAR or a WAR.
• We want to build a JAR and a WAR for later deployment.

The spring-boot-maven-plugin dependency provides capabilities for both of the preceding situations. The following snippet shows how we can configure spring-boot-maven-plugin in an application:

    <build>
     <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
     </plugins>
    </build>

The spring-boot-maven-plugin dependency provides several goals for a Spring Boot application. The most popular goal is run (this can be executed as mvn spring-boot:run on the command prompt from the root folder of the project).