spring-boot-server-tests currently uses Maven to build the test jar and war files as part of the tests. This adds quite a bit of complexity. It's also not consistent with the rest of the build where the main Gradle build is used to build the test app. spring-boot-loader-tests is one example of this approach. A benefit to avoiding the use of Maven is that Gradle offers far more control over what can be downloaded from a repository. This will also us to prevent the tests from downloading Spring Boot snapshots from https://repo.spring.io as they should be coming from earlier stages of the build.