Opening our Maven project

In order to open our just created project, follow these steps:

1. Open IntelliJ IDEA
2. In the Welcome window, click on the Open button
3. Choose the directory that contains the file generated with Spring Initializr; you need to select the folder that contains the POM

1. Click on the OK button

Our project should be imported without any errors and, on the left-hand side of the screen, we should see the project files.

If we follow the installation step at the beginning of the chapter, IntelliJ should have set the JDK for this project automatically, if not we can always select on the menu File | Project Structure. Then selecting on the left-hand side of the screen Project, then we can verify which JDK we have, or change it, in the right side in the Project SDK section.

The Welcome Window provides an option to Import Project instead to Open, but there is no need to use it since IntelliJ works perfectly, opening Maven projects directly without importing.