Spring Boot Gradle Plugin

The Spring Boot Gradle plugin provides several Spring Boot-specific features to Gradle, a popular build tool for Java projects. It helps to build and manage the lifecycle of Spring Boot applications. The Spring Boot Gradle plugin enables us to build and manage our Spring Boot applications with the Gradle build tool. This offers so many features, such as :

• Building executable jar or war files.
• Generating a Bill of Materials (BOM) for dependency management.
• Creating a build-info file for version and build metadata.
• Creating native executable images using the Packaging for Containers (PFC) technology.

Prerequisites:

To use the Spring Boot Gradle Plugin, make sure you have the following:

• JDK (Java Development Kit) 8 or later.
• Gradle 4.0 or later.
• Spring Boot 1.5.x or later.
• We must Install the Spring tool (STS).

Gradle Plugin in Spring Boot

1. First, we apply the Spring Boot Plugin to your ‘build.gradle’ file.

groovy:

plugins {
    id 'org.springframework.boot' version '2.5.4'
}

2. We can also apply the Plugin using the legacy plugin application format:

groovy:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:2.5.4")
    }
}

apply plugin: "org.springframework.boot"

3. Dependency Management: To manage dependencies using Spring Boot Plugin, you can use the ‘dependencyManagement‘ section to import the Spring Boot BOM.

groovy:

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-dependencies:2.5.4")
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web"
}

4. Building Executable JAR and WAR files: To build an executable JAR or WAR file, we can use the ‘bootJar‘ or bootWar‘ tasks.

groovy:

bootJar {
    mainClassName = 'com.example.demo.Application'
}

5. To build the application with a native image, we can use the ‘bootBuildImage’ task:

tasks.named("bootBuildImage") {
    imageName.set("docker.example.com/library/${project.name}")
}

6. Generating Build-Info Files: Generate a build-info file, you can use the ‘bootBuildInfo‘ task:

springBoot {
    buildInfo {
        properties {
            artifact = 'example-app'
            version = '1.2.3'
            group = 'com.example'
            name = 'Example application'
        }
    }
}

Step-by-Step Implementation of Gradle Plugin in Spring Boot

Let’s create a simple Spring Boot project by using Gradle.

• Open Spring tool STS
• Click on new project select spring starter project

• Create a project name after this select Gradle groovy and click on Next.
• Now, the Spring Boot project is created successfully.

build.gradle: Inside this, we have Gradle plugin dependencies as mentioned below:

plugins {
    id 'org.springframework.boot' version '2.5.4'
    id 'io.spring.dependency-management' version '1.0.11.RELEASE'
    id 'java'
}

group = 'com.example'
version = '0.0.1-SNAPSHOT'
sourceCompatibility = '11'

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}

dependencyManagement {
    imports {
        mavenBom("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-dependencies:2.5.4")
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web"
    testImplementation "org.springframework.boot:

In this article, we have learnt about Spring Boot Gradle Plugin.