Every SaaS project eventually hits a wall: you need a blog for SEO and marketing, but you don't want to spend three days setting up a CMS or building a whole new subsystem from scratch.
I’ve been there. I’ve built the same blog controller, the same RSS feed, and the same Disqus integration more times than I care to admit. Recently, while working on some side projects, I reached a breaking point. Instead of keeping the blog code locked inside that one repository, I decided to extract it into a portable, shared library called devx-spring-blog (github).
The Problem with the Status Quo
When you look online for Spring Boot blog solutions, you find two extremes. On one side, you have massive CMS platforms like Enonic that are overkill for a simple "thoughts" page. On the other, you have tutorials on how to use CommonMark to parse a file—leaving you to figure out the templates, the CSS namespacing, the RSS generation, and the metadata ourselves.
There was a missing middle: a "Vertical Slice" library. A library where you don't just get a parser; you get the whole feature.
From One Project to > 1 as infra
The real test for devx-spring-blog came when I started some projects. I didn't want to spend any time on a blog. I wanted to focus on the core logic.
By pulling in the shared library, the integration looked like this:
- Add a
@Import(BlogConfiguration.class)to the main application. - Drop a few markdown files into
src/main/resources/content/blog/. - Set a
blog.titlein the properties.
In under five minutes, my project had a professional, SEO optimized blog at /blog with a live RSS feed and social sharing buttons. This confirmed that the extraction wasn't just a refactoring exercise; it was a force multiplier for my next project.
Was it a Waste of Time?
In the short term, extracting code into a library always feels like a detour. It’s easier to just "copy-paste" and move on. But looking at my git logs for another roject, the difference is night and day. Moving from a scattered set of local controllers and templates to a single dependency cleaned up the codebase and made the marketing site much easier to maintain.
Is it a waste of time? Only if you plan on never building another app. For a "fleet" of SaaS products, a portable blog engine is a superpower. It ensures a consistent look and feel across your entire ecosystem while keeping your focus on the core product features.
Open Source and Ready to Use
I’ve made devx-spring-blog open-source and free to use. It’s designed for developers who want the simplicity of a static site generator like Hugo or Jekyll, but within the comfort of their existing Spring Boot environment.
You get:
- Markdown-powered content (no database required).
- Automatic RSS feeds at
/blog/rss.xml. - Built-in SEO with Open Graph and JSON-LD support.
- Namespaced CSS to prevent clashes with your main app styles.
If you’re building your second (or tenth) Spring project and find yourself dreading the blog setup, give it a try. It’s about doing the work once so you never have to do it again.
Find the project on Github - devx-spring-blog.
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