Manually installing from a downloaded distribution

Spring Boot CLI can be downloaded from the official site of Spring Framework:

• https://repo.spring.io/snapshot/org/springframework/boot/spring-boot-cli/2.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-boot-cli-2.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT-bin.zip
  
• https://repo.spring.io/snapshot/org/springframework/boot/spring-boot-cli/2.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/spring-boot-cli-2.0.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT-bin.tar.gz
  

These sites offer manual installation through CLI distributions from the Spring software repository. Once you've downloaded the distribution from the site, there is a text file in it by the name of INSTALL.txt. It contains instructions on how to install the Spring Boot CLI. In short, there is a Spring script in bin/directory which is to be executed. Spring.bat for Windows users a Spring script for Unix.

Spring Boot CLI requires Java JDK v1.8 or above in order to run. No specific environment variables are required to run the CLI; however, you may want to set SPRING_HOME to point to a specific installation. You should also add SPRING_HOME/bin to your PATH environment variable.

To test if you have successfully installed the CLI, you can run the following command:

spring --version 

Let's see the following screenshot:

It has displayed the Spring Boot CLI version on the Command Prompt.

It is a very simple, manual way to install Spring Boot CLI, so it doesn't require more configuration. But the Spring community offers other ways of installing it. Let's see another way of installing the Spring Boot CLI.