Spring Boot Deployment Tutorial

updated 22 April 2022

To demonstrate, I'll use my very own project purely written in Java and if you are interested in the project itself, please refer to the original repo of this project.

This repo focuses on how to use the Spring Boot to create a production-grade executable jar file. Spring Boot is concerned with the infrastructure while you focus on writing your program. Take note, this is non-web GUI application. It's really that simple to build and run any of your existing Java program through Spring Boot. If I have to put web features or to connect to a server in this project, I can do that easily too in my code and Spring Boot will take care of the infrastructure.

First, there must be the maven plugin to create the executable jar file in the pom.xml:

<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>

Second, you tell Spring Boot the main method of your program because it has its own main method.

<configuration>
	<mainClass>xdvrx1ProjectSwing.MainMethod</mainClass>
</configuration>	

And finally, when your program launches GUI, you must set the headless mode in the SpringMainMethod file to false or else it will throw a HeadlessException.

SpringApplicationBuilder builder = 
	new SpringApplicationBuilder(SpringMainMethod.class);
	builder.headless(false);
	ConfigurableApplicationContext context = builder.run(args);

What others are doing is relying on CommandLineRunner. This is needed when you want to trap user inputs on the command line once the Spring Boot is started and before your program runs. In our case here, we don't need that.

Q&A

If you have questions, please utilize the Discussions feature of GitHub.

You can also create a pull request or raise an issue to start the discussion or query/ies.

Compile, Build & Run

Before you compile and build, make sure you are at the project directory SpringBootProjectDir of this repo. Take note also, I'm using Maven build tool here.

In Windows,

to package your program as an executable jar file:

mvn clean package

to simply clean and compile:

mvn clean compile

to just clean your project:

mvn clean

to run the program:

mvn spring-boot:run

to build and run the program:

mvn clean install

Contributing

1. Fork it!
2. Then, made changes, and create a pull request. I'm much more willing to collaborate with you!

License

MIT - the permissive license