Create Spring Boot

Java microservices developers can leverage the opinionated resources and preconfigured components of Spring Boot. This software framework takes the Spring platform and adds preconfigured components, third-party libraries, software packagers, and command-line tools for running specialized scripts.

The aim of Spring Boot is to create Spring-based software such as microservices, which can be deployed using the java command-line runtime or standalone Web Application Resource (WAR) package files. Spring Boot uses Spring as a foundation for development, and enhances it with components that provides faster development and deployment, opinionated configuration and setup to get started developing microservices quickly, and a plugin framework that features Maven and Gradle project support.

Spring Boot and Jenkins X

You can incorporate Jenkins X into your Spring Boot projects in two ways:

1. By importing existing Spring Boot code using jx import

2. By creating a Spring Boot application from scratch using jx create spring

Importing existing Spring Boot projects

If you have an Spring Boot project (perhaps created using the Spring Boot Initializr) that you want to manage builds using Jenkins X, you can use jx import to commit your code to a Git service such as GitHub, add a Dockerfile to build your Spring Boot project as a Docker image, a pipeline.yaml to your ~/.jx/ directory that manages the development pipeline, and a Helm chart for running as a package in Kubernetes.

1. Change into your Spring Boot project directory:

cd my-springapp/

2. Run the import from a command-line:

jx import

3. The application asks for your Git username (such as myuser).

4. The application asks if you wan to initialize your project in Git.

5. The application asks you what organization to use for managing builds (for example, myorg)

6. The application asks if you want to name your repository (such as my-springapp)

You can now perform builds, commit project code to your newly created Git repository, and Jenkins X will automatically process pull requests and create previews of your applications for testing and validation.

Creating a new Spring Boot application

If you are evaluating Spring Boot in your Jenkins X environment and need an application template of a Spring Boot project that is preconfigured with CI/CD pipeline and GitOps promotion, use jx create to make the preconfigured project.

1. Run the Spring Boot creation via command-line:

jx create spring

2. The application asks for your Git username (such as myuser)

3. The application lets you choose your Git organization from an available list

4. The application asks for a repository name, such as my-springapp1

5. The application prompts you for the development language for your project (by default, java)

6. The application prompts you for a group ID (by default, com.example)

7. The application prompts you for any Spring Boot starters, or dependency descriptors that you can use to make your development smoother and quicker.

   We recommend at minimum the Actuator and Web dependencies, which you can activate by moving to those checkboxes and hitting the Space Bar to select them. The application prompts you to initialize Git

There is a demo of using the command: jx create spring.

You can also pass certain options to the jx create command, such as specifying Spring Boot dependencies:

jx create spring -d web -d actuator

The -d argument lets you specify the Spring Boot dependencies you wish to add to your spring boot application. In the above example, the command calls the web argument, which passes in the Web Starter dependency to create RESTful web applications; the actuator dependency for monitoring the health and metrics your application. When you omit the -d arguments and let the jx command prompt you to pick the dependencies via a CLI wizard

We recommend you always include the actuator dependency in your Spring Boot applications as it helps provide health checks for Liveness and Readiness probes.

Spring Boot projects managed by Jenkins X

The two methods of configuring Spring Boot projects in Jenkins X performs several actions:

• Create a new Spring Boot application in a local subdirectory

• Add your source code into a Git repository

• Create a remote git repository on a git service, such as GitHub

• Commit your code to the remote Git service

• Adds default build files to your project:

  • A Dockerfile to build your application as a docker image

  • A pipeline.yaml to implement the CI / CD pipeline

  • A helm chart to run your application inside Kubernetes

• Registers a webhook (such as http://hook-jx.192.169.1.100.nip.io/hook) on the remote git repository

• trigger the first pipeline build

You can now use your Git-enabled local project subdirectory to make changes to your Spring Boot application, push those changes to Git, and automatically have Jenkins X build, create previews for testing and validation, and promote your app to production for general usage.

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