spring-projects/spring-data-rest

Simplifies building hypermedia-driven REST web services on top of Spring Data repositories

Java

957

1,768 commits

updated Oct 14, 2026

spring.io/projects/spring-data-rest

See the code

README

The goal of the project is to provide a flexible and configurable mechanism for writing simple services that can be exposed over HTTP.

This takes your Spring Data repositories and front-ends them with HTTP, allowing you full CRUD capability over your entities, to include managing associations.

Features

Exposes a discoverable REST API for your domain model using HAL as media type.
Exposes collection, item and association resources representing your model.
Supports pagination via navigational links.
Allows to dynamically filter collection resources.
Exposes dedicated search resources for query methods defined in your repositories.
Allows to hook into the handling of REST requests by handling Spring ApplicationEvents.
Exposes metadata about the model discovered as ALPS and JSON Schema.
Allows to define client specific representations through projections.
Ships the latest release of HAL Explorer to easily explore HAL and HAL-FORMS based HTTP responses.
Supports JPA, MongoDB, Neo4j, Solr, Cassandra, Gemfire.
Allows advanced customizations of the default resources exposed.

Code of Conduct

This project is governed by the Spring Code of Conduct. By participating, you are expected to uphold this code of conduct. Please report unacceptable behavior to [email protected].

Getting Started

Here is a quick teaser of an application using Spring Data REST in Java:

@CrossOrigin
@RepositoryRestResource(path = "people")
public interface PersonRepository extends CrudRepository<Person, Long> {

  List<Person> findByLastname(String lastname);

  @RestResource(path = "byFirstname")
  List<Person> findByFirstnameLike(String firstname);
}

@Configuration
@EnableMongoRepositories
class ApplicationConfig extends AbstractMongoConfiguration {

  @Override
  public MongoClient mongoClient() {
    return new MongoClient();
  }

  @Override
  protected String getDatabaseName() {
    return "springdata";
  }
}

curl -v "http://localhost:8080/people/search/byFirstname?firstname=Oliver*&sort=name,desc"

Maven configuration

Add the Maven dependency:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-data-rest</artifactId>
  <version>${version}.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

If you’d rather like the latest snapshots of the upcoming major version, use our Maven snapshot repository and declare the appropriate dependency version.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.data</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-data-rest</artifactId>
  <version>${version}-SNAPSHOT</version>
</dependency>

<repository>
  <id>spring-snapshot</id>
  <name>Spring Snapshot Repository</name>
  <url>https://repo.spring.io/snapshot</url>
</repository>

Getting Help

Having trouble with Spring Data? We’d love to help!

Check the reference documentation, and Javadocs.
Learn the Spring basics – Spring Data builds on Spring Framework, check the spring.io web-site for a wealth of reference documentation. If you are just starting out with Spring, try one of the guides.
If you are upgrading, check out the changelog for “new and noteworthy” features.
Ask a question - we monitor stackoverflow.com for questions tagged with spring-data-rest.
Report bugs with Spring Data REST at https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-data-rest/issues.

Reporting Issues

Spring Data uses GitHub as issue tracking system to record bugs and feature requests. If you want to raise an issue, please follow the recommendations below:

Before you log a bug, please search the issue tracker to see if someone has already reported the problem.
If the issue doesn’t already exist, create a new issue.
Please provide as much information as possible with the issue report, we like to know the version of Spring Data that you are using and JVM version.
If you need to paste code, or include a stack trace use GitHub’s flavor of Markdown and wrap your code with triple-backquotes.
If possible try to create a test-case or project that replicates the issue. Attach a link to your code or a compressed file containing your code.

Building from Source

You don’t need to build from source to use Spring Data (binaries in repo.spring.io), but if you want to try out the latest and greatest, Spring Data can be easily built with the maven wrapper. You also need JDK 17.

 $ ./mvnw clean install

If you want to build with the regular mvn command, you will need Maven v3.5.0 or above.

Also see CONTRIBUTING.adoc if you wish to submit pull requests, and in particular please sign the Contributor’s Agreement before your first non-trivial change.

Building reference documentation

Building the documentation builds also the project without running tests.

 $ ./mvnw clean install -Pantora

The generated documentation is available from target/site/reference/html/index.html.

Guides

The spring.io site contains several guides that show how to use Spring Data step-by-step:

Accessing JPA Data with REST is a guide to creating a REST web service exposing data stored with JPA through repositories.
Accessing MongoDB Data with REST is a guide to creating a REST web service exposing data stored in MongoDB through repositories.
Accessing Neo4j Data with REST is a guide to creating a REST web service exposing data stored in Neo4j through repositories.
Accessing GemFire Data with REST is a guide to creating a REST web service exposing data stored in Pivotal GemFire through repositories.