Spring Boot Cookbook

Building self-executing binaries

Starting with Spring Boot version 1.3, the Gradle and Maven plugins support an option of generating true executable binaries, which look like normal JAR files, but have the content of JAR fused together with the launch script that contains the command-building logic and is capable of self-starting itself without the need to execute the java -jar file.jar command explicitly. This capability comes in very handy as it allows the easy configuration of the Linux autostart services such as init.d or systemd and launchd on OS X.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will use our existing application build. We will examine how the self-starting executable JAR files get created and how to modify the default launch script to add ...