How to deploy a Spring Boot application with Docker

Dockerfile

For our image we use the alpine linux listribution. This is a minimalistic distribution ideal for our deployment.

We copy the jar file to the /opt directory as suggested by the FHS

## alpine linux with JRE 
FROM openjdk:8-jre-alpine 
 
## copy the spring jar 
COPY target/*.jar /opt/myApp.jar 
 
CMD ["/usr/bin/java", "-jar", "/opt/myApp.jar"] 

To have a runnable jar you need to repackage the default jar.

Here you can find the official documentation:
spring-boot:repackage

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

Build and run

You can build your Dockerfile with e.g.:

docker build -t spring-example .

and run it with:

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 spring-example

Error without repackaging

If you get this error no main manifest attribute, in [name of your app] something went wrong with the spring-boot-maven-plugin.

Verifiy that it is correctly configured.

Alpine image size

The alpine image size is smaller compared to other distributions.

The version with JRE (8-jre-alpine) is 82MB, the JDK's version is 102MB.