Using Spring Initializr for generating a Spring WebFlux project is really easy. But for us to get a handle on the various aspects of a WebFlux application, we will build aspect by ourselves. However, we will be using Spring Boot to run our application.

We will create a maven project, and will then add the following main dependencies (to make the code shorter, only important dependencies are shown in the following code) to our pom.xml:

<!--Spring Framework and Spring Boot-->
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-webflux</artifactId>
</dependency>
<!--JSON-->
<dependency>
…
</dependency>
<!--Logging-->
<dependency>
…
</dependency>
<!--Testing-->
<dependency>
…
</dependency>

We will include snapshot repositories for both the library and plugin dependencies. Finally, we will add the all-important maven plugin for our Spring Boot, as follows:

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