Document using the Shadow plugin as an alternative to Boot's fat jars when using Gradle

[btiernay]

I found the following is required in Gradle to get a fat jar working when cannot use the spring-boot-gradle-plugin plugin:

import com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins.shadow.transformers.*

// Can't use Boot's nested jar packaging due to environment constrained classloader
apply plugin: 'com.github.johnrengelman.shadow'

shadowJar {
  zip64 true

  exclude 'META-INF/*.SF'
  exclude 'META-INF/*.DSA'
  exclude 'META-INF/*.RSA'

  // Required for Spring
  mergeServiceFiles()
  transform(AppendingTransformer) { resource = 'reference.conf'  }
  transform(AppendingTransformer) { resource = 'META-INF/spring.handlers'  }
  transform(AppendingTransformer) { resource = 'META-INF/spring.schemas'  }
  transform(AppendingTransformer) { resource = 'META-INF/spring.tooling'  }
  transform(PropertiesFileTransformer) { paths = ['META-INF/spring.factories' ] }

  // ...
}

The docs should strongly recommend the shadow / shade plugins for environmentally constrained classloaders¹ because resource transformation is a requirement. Without it, essential beans such as converters, property placeholder configurers, etc. go missing from Spring Boot's autoconfiguration (i.e. spring.factories). The result is very difficult to diagnose.

¹environmentally constrained classloaders: A system classloader not under your control.

[snicoll]

what do you mean not using the boot plugin? Are you creating a fat jar yourself?

[btiernay]

Yes, this is a requirement in certain environments such as Hadoop, Spark, Storm, etc. since they don't know how to load nested jars. Please see #1668 for more details on this topic.

[btiernay]

Here is the section in the docs im referring to
http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/executable-jar.html#executable-jar-alternatives

[btiernay]

Just hit an issue in a new Spring Boot version. I needed to amend the above to have:

transform(PropertiesFileTransformer) { paths = ['META-INF/spring.factories' ] }

This seemed to have resolved my issue.

[unilama]

Final working example should be like that, strategy is required if you are using several components that contains spring.factories:

import com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins.shadow.transformers.*
shadowJar {

    // Required for Spring
    mergeServiceFiles()
    append 'META-INF/spring.handlers'
    append 'META-INF/spring.schemas'
    append 'META-INF/spring.tooling'
    transform(PropertiesFileTransformer) {
        paths = ['META-INF/spring.factories' ]
        mergeStrategy = "append"
    }

}

I hope it will save someone's lot of time :)

[philwebb]

We're cleaning out the issue tracker and closing issues that we've not seen much demand to fix. Feel free to comment with additional justifications if you feel that this one should not have been closed.

[wilkinsona]

I think there might be some merit to doing something in this area. Spring Cloud Function (and FaaS in general) would benefit from an easy way to produce a shadowed jar. We really need something that's equivalent to the Maven Shade Plugin's configuration from the starter parent pom. That could take the form of documentation, or it could possibly take the form of some code in Boot's gradle plugin that sets up the various transformers.