Making an executable jar out of spring boot MVC project serving content using JSP and a custom parent set in POM

Question

I had a Spring MVC project that I'm converting to spring boot. This project of mine cannot be given spring-boot-starter-parent as parent because I need to keep a custom parent. I solved this first issue by injecting spring-boot-dependencies in dependencyManagement. I also need my project to embed a tomcat, so I've used spring-boot-starter-web. I need to use JSP so i've added the dependencies to jstl and jasper.

<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-dependencies</artifactId>
            <version>2.1.4.RELEASE</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.springframework.boot/spring-boot-loader -->
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-loader</artifactId>
        <version>2.1.4.RELEASE</version>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-embed-jasper</artifactId>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.tomcat.embed</groupId>
        <artifactId>tomcat-embed-core</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
    </dependency>
<!-- ... -->
</dependencies>

Compiling the jar and launching the server using

mvn spring-boot:run

correctly works. Now I'd like to make it work as executable jar, too.

I have read some documentation, posts, web pages, stack overflow questions, but I still cannot make it properly work.

In this question, reading the edited version of the accepted answer and the github project it looks very easy to make an executable jar out of a project having as parent spring-boot-starter-parent. Is it possible to make it work with a custom parent too?

I have already tried to follow these guidelines but it doesn't work with my project. I tried adding the plugin

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <goals>
                <goal>repackage</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

both with and without the execution node

and the plugin

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.0</version>
    <configuration>
        <failOnMissingWebXml>false</failOnMissingWebXml>
        <archive>
            <manifestFile>src/main/webapp/META-INF/MANIFEST.MF</manifestFile>
        </archive>
<!--    <archive>-->
<!--        <manifest>-->
<!--            <mainClass>my-boot-application</mainClass>-->
<!--            <springBootClasses>WEB-INF/classes/</springBootClasses>-->
<!--            <springBootLib>WEB-INF/lib/</springBootLib>-->
<!--        </manifest>-->
<!--    </archive>-->
    </configuration>
</plugin>

both with and without the manifest customized information.

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 30 '19 at 16:06

Eventually I have incurred in this stackoverflow post listing all that is necessary to make a spring boot application using jsp, embedded tomcat and custom parent project work.

So, my pom.xml is now much readable and compact and looks much like the examples in the link.

Making an executable jar out of spring boot MVC project serving content using JSP and a custom parent set in POM

1 Answers1