Spring Boot: Up and Running

Chapter 11. Deploying Your Spring Boot Application

In software development, deployment is the on-ramp to production for an application.

Regardless of any capabilities an application may promise its end users, until said users can actually use the application, it is effectively an academic what-if exercise. Figuratively and often very literally, deployment is the payoff.

Referencing the Spring Initializr, many developers are aware that Spring Boot applications can be created as WAR files or JAR files. Most of those same developers also know that there are many good reasons (several of which were mentioned earlier in this book) to eschew the WAR option and create executable JAR files, and few good reasons to do the opposite. What many developers may not realize is that even when building a Spring Boot executable JAR, there are numerous options for deployment to fulfill various requirements and use cases.

In this chapter, I examine ways to deploy your Spring Boot application with options useful for different target destinations and discuss their relative merits. I then demonstrate how to create these deployment artifacts, explain options for optimal execution, and show how to verify their components and provenance. You almost certainly have more and better tools for deploying your Spring Boot applications than you realized.

Code Checkout Checkup

Please check out branch chapter11begin from the code repository to begin.

Revisiting the Spring Boot Executable JAR

As discussed way back ...