How to enable spring support in IntelliJ Community Edition 2016.1.3

You can't enable Spring support with IntelliJ community Edition, it only available with paying version (Ultimate).
However, you can create the .xml file manually and CE version also supports it (a little bit).
To working with Spring or J2EE, you should get familiar with build tools like Maven, Gradle (or Ant in some special case). The concept is simple and you can get it easily from the official website (https://maven.apache.org/ - http://gradle.org/).
For Spring, if you are not familiar with creating a .xml file, you can use Java configuration instead or move to use Spring-boot to forget this configuration file (almost).
However, at first, I think you should get the basic concept of Spring and try to work well with .xml files configure. It'll be helpful in the future when you work with it deeply.


The Spring support plugin is a feature of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, which is a commercial IDE. It's not available in the free Community Edition.

You don't need any plugin to generate the beans.xml file; you can write it manually in the source code editor.


Let's take things one by one:

  1. Your problem understanding builds management tools like maven and gradle. Try these links for tutorials: Maven in 5 Minutes, gradle is very advance build automation tool with continuous Integration features, you can find a good comparison between gradle and maven here.

  2. If you are confused about spring to try this book: Spring in Action 3rd Edition (4th Edition is also available, I recommend 3rd edition as you will be able to link XML to annotations.)

  3. You do not need any tool to generate XML files. Copy a sample spring configuration file from the internet, remove unwanted elements and write your own beans.