Getting Started With Spring Boot With

Postgres
Beginners Guide to Using Postgres with Spring Boot

Introduction
 The goal of this article is to set up a Postgres database with sample data and then
use Spring boot to connect with the database and serve data to the end user as
the rest endpoint.
 Note that this article is beginner-friendly. All the codes have been made
available on GitHub
 In future articles, I will use this setup to demonstrate some of the advanced
databases, and JPA concepts ( associations, partitioning, sharding, transactions,
etc) using the help of setup performed in this article.

Install Postgres
Install Postgres Database

 I have a mac environment so my commands are most suitable for mac. i believe
there are equivalent tools to install on the respective environment like windows
and Linux.

#install database
brew install postgresql
# start database
brew services start postgresql

Configure

 Once we started the service, we can log in to the default postgres database

 We need to configure Postgres with a role for our default postgres database.

 Now we can log in using a user that we created.

Install PGAdmin

 PGAdmin is a nice GUI tool that helps us to interact and operate over our
postgres database server.
 I downloaded the package here for mac. but you can find appropriate for your
environment.
 Once installation is done we can set up a connection to our database.
Setup connection string

 The bare minimum requirement is just a hostname, port, database, username,

and password.
 on the local system, the hostname would be localhost. the default port is 5432
unless you have set a custom port. we are using the default postgres database
and username/password we created above as admin/root
Setup Postgres Sample Data
Create Accounts Table

CREATE TABLE accounts (

user_id serial PRIMARY KEY,
username VARCHAR ( 50 ) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
password VARCHAR ( 50 ) NOT NULL,
email VARCHAR ( 255 ) UNIQUE NOT NULL,
created_on TIMESTAMP NOT NULL,
last_login TIMESTAMP
);

Insert Rows

 Simple insert row command would look like below

insert into accounts (username, password, email, created_on,
last_login) values('user2', 'password1234', '[email protected]', now(),
now());

 But let's add more rows to the table so that we have more data to play with
 We are using a loop to generate multiple rows.

do $$
begin
for index in 3..10 loop
insert into accounts (username, password, email, created_on,
last_login) values( concat('user', index), 'password1234',
concat('abc', index, '@gmail.com'), now(), now());
end loop;
end ; $$

 Now let's select the rows from the account table to verify if the inserts were
successful

select * from accounts;

 Now our sample dataset is ready which we can connect with the application and
build API on top of it and return as best response.

Operating Database with PSQL

 We can perform all the above operations using the command line as well.

Connecting to database

Listing all the databases

Switching database & Listing Tables

Describing the schema of the table

Selecting all the records from the table

Sprint Boot Project

 Goto start.spring.io and create the project name “spring-postgres”.
 I like maven as a build tool so I selected that but you can choose Gradle as well.
 I chose the java 17 version since that's the latest I have on my machine.
 Add dependencies such as Spring web, Spring data jpa,
  Also, add postgres driver in order to connect to postgres database. the easiest
way is to add the dependency in pom.xml

<dependency>
<groupId>org.postgresql</groupId>
<artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
<scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

Configure Database Connection

 I am using IntelliJ IDEA to open this project, you can use it with any idea that
you are comfortable with (Eclipse, Netbeans, or even VSCode )
 The first thing that we have to do is to set up the database connection
configuration in a resource file called applications.properties

spring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/postgres
spring.datasource.username=admin
spring.datasource.password=root

Write Application Code

Entity

 We will create an entity that will map the database table to Java Object.

@Entity
@Table(name="ACCOUNTS")
public class Account {
@Id @GeneratedValue
private int userId;
private String username;
private String password;
private String email;
private Date createdOn;
private Date lastLogin;

//...... more code

Repository

 Next, we will create a repository interface, which will provide all the basic
CRUD capabilities to execute against postgres database.
 It's very simple using Spring data jpa, we just need to extend JpaRepository
Interface and pass the Entity name and primary_key.
 Check out this file if you are interested.

package com.example.springpostgres.dao;

import com.example.springpostgres.entity.Account;
import org.springframework.data.jpa.repository.JpaRepository;

public interface AccountRepository extends JpaRepository<Account,

Integer> {

Logic/Service

 Now, we will create a logic/service class. The job of this class is to house
business logic if any.
 Our Logic class does not include any business logic, as of now just uses a
repository object to query the database and return the result.

@Service
public class AccountLogic {

@Autowired
private AccountRepository accountRepository;

public List<Account> getAccounts(){

return accountRepository.findAll();
}

Controller
  Now we are ready to create a controller that will handle user requests and return
the appropriate responses.
 We will create AccountController, it has one get endpoint account that returns a
list of accounts in postgres table.

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/accounts")
public class AccountController {

@Autowired
private AccountLogic accountLogic;

@GetMapping()
@ResponseBody()
public List<Account> account(){
return accountLogic.getAccounts();
}
}

Execution
 We can execute the main method of SpringPostgresApplication class. The
default port would 8080 and the endpoint that will be available to us would be
http://localhost:8080/accounts
 You will see below message when application started successfully after running
main method of SpringPostgresApplication.

 If you are using IntelliJ IDEA, you will see the terminal at the bottom tab and
now we can use it to run the curl command.

Output

 Curl command returns a list of all the accounts

we can also see the result in the browser

Write First Custom Query

 In this section, we will see how we can write custom queries in spring boot.
 We can use @Query provided by spring data jpa to execute the JPA query. The
below example is just returning userId greater or equal to the passed integer
value.
 We will take this integer from the user as a rest request and pass it as an
argument to this query method.

public interface AccountRepository extends JpaRepository<Account,

Integer> {

@Query("select a from Account a where a.userId >= :userId")

List<Account> findAllWithFilteredUserId(
@Param("userId") Integer userId);
}

Logic

public List<Account> getConditionalAccount(Integer userId){

return accountRepository.findAllWithFilteredUserId(userId);
}
Controller

 For the controller in request we are passing the userId param which is an integer
and filter endpoint basically listening to the request.

@GetMapping("/filter")
@ResponseBody()
public List<Account> accountWithCondition(@RequestParam Integer
userId){
return accountLogic.getConditionalAccount(userId);
}

Curl Request

 For the curl request, I am passing userId as the path parameter and we can see
that we are only seeing the result where userid is 5 or more

Code Repository
 As usual, I added a code repository to the github.

Conclusion
 In this article, we set up the Postgres database and serve the data using spring
boot rest API.
 We also learn how to write custom SQL queries to fetch the data from the
Postgres database.
 In future articles, we will use this setup to learn about some advanced concepts
like ( associations, partitioning, sharding, transactions, etc)

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