Spring Boot Create Executable using Maven with Parent Pom

Maven users can inherit from the spring-boot-starter-parent project to obtain sensible defaults. You should only need to specify the Spring Boot version number on this dependency. If you import additional starters, you can safely omit the version number. This tutorial demonstrates how to create an executable jar/war using Maven with a Parent POM. In another tutorial, you can also create an executable jar/war without using a parent pom

Create Executable JAR/WAR With Parent Pom

We are using Apache Maven to create and manage our project dependencies. You can inherit from the spring-boot-starter-parent to bootstrap spring-boot. When choosing to inherit from the parent, you can create an executable jar or war using the spring-boot-maven-plugin and setting the executable element of the configuration element to true.

Note: You can create either a jar or a war file. You can configure this by setting the packaging element to the appropriate value for your needs.

You can optionally specify the main-class that bootstraps the application. When omitted, spring automatically searches for a public static void main(String[] args) method.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0
                             http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">

    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.memorynotfound.springboot</groupId>
    <artifactId>executable-with-parent</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <url>https://memorynotfound.com</url>
    <name>Spring Boot - ${project.artifactId}</name>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>

    <parent>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
        <version>1.5.3.RELEASE</version>
    </parent>

    <properties>
        <java.version>1.8</java.version>
    </properties>

    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <executable>true</executable>
                    <mainClass>com.memorynotfound.springboot.Application</mainClass>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

</project>

Bootstrapping Spring Boot

To illustrate this example, we created a simple class that’ll print some basic output to the console.

package com.memorynotfound.springboot;

import org.slf4j.Logger;
import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import javax.annotation.PostConstruct;

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

    private static Logger log = LoggerFactory.getLogger(Application.class);

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
    }

    @PostConstruct
    private void init(){
        log.info("creating an executable jar/war with spring boot with parent pom");
    }

}

Creating the Executable with Maven

We create the executable running the following maven goals.

mvn clean package

Running the executable

Once the previous tasks complets, we can execute the generated jar or war using the following command.

java -jar executable-with-parent.jar

Output

The previous application generates the following output.

  .   ____          _            __ _ _
 /\\ / ___'_ __ _ _(_)_ __  __ _ \ \ \ \
( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` | \ \ \ \
 \\/  ___)| |_)| | | | | || (_| |  ) ) ) )
  '  |____| .__|_| |_|_| |_\__, | / / / /
 =========|_|==============|___/=/_/_/_/
 :: Spring Boot ::        (v1.5.3.RELEASE)

2017-05-29 09:14:49.234  INFO 980 --- [           main] c.memorynotfound.springboot.Application  : Starting Application v1.0.0-SNAPSHOT 
2017-05-29 09:14:49.238 DEBUG 980 --- [           main] c.memorynotfound.springboot.Application  : Running with Spring Boot v1.5.3.RELEASE, Spring v4.3.8.RELEASE
2017-05-29 09:14:49.239  INFO 980 --- [           main] c.memorynotfound.springboot.Application  : No active profile set, falling back to default profiles: default
2017-05-29 09:14:49.800  INFO 980 --- [           main] c.memorynotfound.springboot.Application  : creating an executable jar/war with spring boot with parent pom
2017-05-29 09:14:50.054  INFO 980 --- [           main] c.memorynotfound.springboot.Application  : Started Application in 11.244 seconds (JVM running for 11.614)

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