Unable to retrieve information of available starters."

[Luo-hongyi]

Get error message: "Unable to retrieve information of available starters." when "Add starters" in pom.xml

[SunBK201]

I worked around this issue by upgrading the version of spring-boot-starter-parent (from 2.3.9.RELEASE to 3.4.0)：

<parent>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <version>3.4.0</version>
</parent>

[martinlippert]

The Spring Initializr uses https://start.spring.io to get the metadata for available starters. And start.spring.io only supports those Spring versions that are still supported in the open-source. Since Sprint Boot 2.3.9.RELEASE is no longer supported, the initializer extension doesn't get any information for this version from start.spring.io and therefore can't provide the necessary information about available starters.

We can close this as works-as-designed. The only thing that could be improved here is the error message that shows up, which looks like something went wrong inside of the initializr feature. Instead, the error message should be adjusted. The important piece here would be to distinguish between "real" problems accessing start.spring.io (so something goes wrong indeed) and the situation in this case, where start.spring.io does't return data for the specific Spring Boot version - and show appropriate error messages for both cases.

@wenytang-ms