The liberty-gradle-plugin provides support for Spring Boot applications, allowing you to thin out and install Spring Boot executable JARs to Open Liberty and WebSphere Liberty runtime versions 18.0.0.2 and above. You can package executable JAR or WAR archives using spring-boot-dependencies.
Limitations: Spring Boot applications are not supported with looseApplication=true from the Liberty extension properties. Since both libertyDev and libertyDevc tasks require looseApplication=true, Spring Boot applications are not supported with either of those tasks.
| Parameter | Description | Required |
|---|---|---|
| sourceAppPath | The path of the source application file to thin. | Yes |
| parentLibCachePath | The directory path of the parent read-only library cache. The parent library cache is searched first to locate existing libraries. If the library is not found, the library is stored in the writable library cache that is specified by the targetLibCachePath option. If this option is not specified, no parent library cache is searched. |
No |
| targetLibCachePath | The directory path that is used to save the library cache. If this option is not specified, a lib.index.cache directory is created in the parent directory of the source application. |
No |
| targetThinAppPath | The path that is used to save the thin application file. If this option is not specified, a new file is created with the .spring extension in the parent directory of the source application. |
No |
The server.xml file provided by the configDirectory or serverXmlFile parameter should enable the one of the following Spring Boot features.
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| springBoot-1.5 | Required to support applications with Spring Boot version 1.5.x. |
| springBoot-2.0 | Required to support applications with Spring Boot version 2.x. |
| springBoot-3.0 | Required to support applications with Spring Boot version 3.x. |
The Liberty features that support the Spring Boot starters can be found here. They should be enabled in the server.xml along with the appropriate Spring Boot feature.
The Spring Boot Gradle plugin 3.x requires Java 17 and a minimum of Gradle 7.5. There is a known build conflict that Spring Boot Gradle plugin 1.5.x is incompatible with Gradle 5.x. As the Spring Boot 1.5.x plugin will not be updated to support Gradle 5.x, consider upgrading the Spring Boot plugin or downgrading Gradle.
| Spring Boot version | Advised Gradle version |
|---|---|
| 3.x | 7.5+ or 8.x |
| 2.x | 4.x+ |
| 1.5.x | 2.9 or 3.x (Although we observed compatibility up to 4.10, proceed at your own risk) |
Refer to the current release Spring docs to be advised on Gradle compatibility for the latest Spring Boot Gradle plugin.