Building a Search Page Backend with Spring Boot, MySQL & Swagger

In modern web applications, search functionality is critical. Whether users are filtering products by location, manufacturing process, or any other attribute, a robust and efficient backend is key to delivering fast and accurate results.

One of the projects I’ve developed was exactly this — a Search Page Backend built using Spring Boot, Spring Data JPA, and Swagger for API documentation and testing. In this post, I’ll walk you through how it works, the tools I used, and how you can set it up yourself.

🔍 Project Overview

This backend service allows users to search pages based on specific filters like:

• 🌍 Location

• 🏭 Manufacturing process

The goal was to create a clean, modular, and scalable solution that integrates easily with any frontend and delivers fast query responses from the database.

🧰 Technologies Used

IntelliJ IDEA

Development Environment

MySQL

Relational Database

Swagger UI

API Testing & Documentation

📦 Dependencies

This project uses the following dependencies:

• Spring Web – for creating RESTful APIs

• Spring Data JPA – to interact with the MySQL database using object-oriented code

• Lombok – to reduce boilerplate code with annotations like @Getter, @Setter, @Builder, etc.

• Spring Dev Tools – for hot reload and improved dev experience

• MySQL Connector – to connect to the MySQL database

• Swagger OpenAPI – to automatically generate interactive REST API documentation

⚙️ Setup and Installation

✅ Prerequisites

Make sure you have:

• JDK 11 or higher

• Maven

• MySQL Server

🛠️ Steps to Set It Up

1. Clone the Project

    git clone https://github.com/jayalloyd/search-page-backend.git
    cd search-page-backend
   

2. Configure Database
   application.properties:

   
    spring.datasource.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/your_db
    spring.datasource.username=root
    spring.datasource.password=your_password
    spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto=update
   

3. Build and Run the Application

    mvn clean install
    mvn spring-boot:run
   

4. Test the APIs with Swagger
   Navigate to:

    http://localhost:8080/swagger-ui/
   

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🔧 Key Features

The application supports dynamic filtering of pages based on:

• Single criteria (e.g., just location)

• Multiple criteria (e.g., location + manufacturing process)

Using Spring Data JPA, custom queries can be defined for performance-optimized search, and Swagger helps developers interact with and test endpoints in real time.

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📈 Final Thoughts

This was a rewarding project to build — not just because it added solid search functionality to an app, but also because it showed how well Spring Boot, JPA, and Swagger work together for building modern APIs.

If you're building any system that requires flexible search capabilities, this setup is a great place to start.

Want to see the frontend that goes with this backend? Let me know, and I’ll be happy to share that too!