Two Solutions to address Spring Initializer not supporting Java 8

Overview

If you use Intellij IDEA to create a Spring project, you will notice that the Java 8 option is no longer available when choosing the Java version. That's right, Spring officially no longer supports Java 8. This article will introduce two solutions to the problem of Spring Initializer not supporting Java 8.

1、Use start.aliyun.com as an alternative to spring initializer

Although the official https://start.spring.io no longer supports Java 8, you can use https://start.aliyun.com as an alternative. Here are the specific steps to follow:

2、Start a local initializer

Speaking of it, Alibaba Cloud's support for Java is indeed quite strong. As mentioned earlier, instead of the official Spring Initializer, you can use https://start.aliyun.com as an alternative. Not only that, Alibaba has also open-sourced cloud-native-app-initializer. With this project, we can completely start a local service to support Java 8 on our own.

Since cloud-native-app-initializer provides a Docker image, starting it locally is quite simple, just two commands:

docker pull registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/cloud-native-app-initializer/initializer:latest
docker run -it -p 127.0.0.1:7001:7001 registry.cn-hangzhou.aliyuncs.com/cloud-native-app-initializer/initializer:latest

After a successful startup, access http://127.0.0.1:7001/bootstrap.html for the local version of start.aliyun.com. Of course, we can also configure http://127.0.0.1:7001 in Intellij IDEA.

Fellow stubborn folks, we can happily use Java 8 again!!