Spring Boot REST API Best Practices

Ramesh Fadatare

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7 min read

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Jan 9, 2025

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Building REST APIs with Spring Boot is common in the microservices ecosystem. However, simply building an API is not enough. To ensure maintainability, scalability, and efficiency, following best practices is crucial. Here, we will explore some of the best practices for building REST APIs with Spring Boot and illustrate them with examples.

1. Follow RESTful Resource Naming Guidelines

Using nouns for resource names and HTTP verbs for actions creates a clear and intuitive API structure. It helps clients understand what resources are available and what operations they can perform on them.

Example:

Good:

GET /users
POST /users
GET /users/{id}
PUT /users/{id}
DELETE /users/{id}

Bad:

GET /getUsers
POST /createUser
GET /getUserById
POST /updateUser
POST /deleteUser

In the above example, /users as a resource with HTTP GET indicates fetching user data, and with POST, it indicates creating a new user. This is more intuitive than /getUsers or /createUser, which tie the action to the URI, violating the REST principle that the URI should represent a resource, not the action on the resource.

2. Use HTTP Status Codes Appropriately

HTTP status codes provide immediate insight into the result of an HTTP request. For instance, if a client sees 201 Created, they know their POST request successfully created a new resource. If they see 400 Bad Request, they are aware there was something wrong with their request. So basically, HTTP status codes are standardized responses to indicate the success or failure of an HTTP request. Using the correct status code is important because it provides an immediate understanding of the result of an API call.

Example:

200 OK: The request was successful.

201 Created: A new resource has been created.

204 No Content: The request was successful, but there’s no content to return.

400 Bad Request: The server cannot process the request due to client-side errors.