STS3 Migration

Migration Guide from Spring Tool Suite 3 (STS) to Spring Tools 4

Preface

Migrating to the Spring Tools 4 in Eclipse is not complicated or requires a huge amount of work. The overall goal is that most of your projects will "just work" in the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse.

However, the feature set of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse and the overall user experience is quite different. So before you migrate, we recommend that you make yourself familiar with the way the Spring Tools 4 work using a sample project or a project of your choice, read through the user guide for Spring Tools 4 in this wiki, and take a look at the feature comparison between Spring Tool Suite 3 and Spring Tools 4 here.

We would recommend to do the migration in these steps:

1. Make yourself familiar with Spring Tools 4 (as described above)
2. backup your projects and your workspace (including its metadata)
3. start with a fresh Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution (do not update an existing STS3 install)
4. make sure to install all your additional third-party plugins into that fresh install
5. try to open your workspace using the new and fresh Spring Tools 4 installation

Common problems and how to solve them

Spring Perspective looks strange and broken

In case you had the Spring Perspective open in your workspace when working with the Spring Tool Suite 3, opening up that workspace will re-open the Spring Perspective again, but it doesn't really exist anymore in the Spring Tools 4. Therefore the workbench looks broken, shows red icons for some empty views, and similar things.

You can solve that by simply closing the Spring Perspective. Right-click on the perspective text at the top of the workbench and select "Close". And continue to use a different perspective, like the default Java one.