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I have troubles with importing classes from an existing Spring-Boot application into my new application after they changed the structure of the build jar file.

They changed the jar-file so that the applications own classes now are located in BOOT-INF/classes and not on the root of the jar-file.

But when I have a normal maven dependency to this Spring-boot application I can not import the existing classes from this application and into my new classes in my new application.

It worked just fine before they changed the structure...

runesr
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2 Answers2

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The solution here is to refactor your code, so that the classes you're depending on in both your applications are available in a separate project.

Now you can use these classes by importing the dependency in both your projects:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.example</groupId>
    <artifactId>example-shared</artifactId>
</dependency>

Make sure that you're not using the Spring boot maven plugin in this newly made shared project and you should probably not use any Spring boot starters either, since they load a lot of dependencies you may not need.

g00glen00b
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  • Yes, I know that probably is the correct way to go. We have created a REST-API as a Spring-Boot application, and defined an object as input to a POST method inside the application. And It has therefore been easy for us to just have a maven-dependency to the API to use the defined object in the calling application as well... And this has worked fine until Spring Boot changed the layout of the jar-files from version 1.4. So I just wondered if there was a possibility to get it work the same way also after version 1.4... – runesr Nov 16 '16 at 19:04
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I found out that it is actually possible to use a Spring Boot application as a dependency. Even though it most likely is not recommended. But in some cases it just makes it easier. This solution means that you can not use the executable archive.

"The executable archive cannot be used as a dependency as the executable jar format packages application classes in BOOT-INF/classes. This means that they cannot be found when the executable jar is used as a dependency."

The solution to my question is to include a configuration classifier to the spring-boot-maven-plugin. Like this for Maven:

<plugin>
 <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
 <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>                
 <configuration>
  <classifier>exec</classifier>
 </configuration>   
</plugin>

or like this for Gradle:

bootRepackage  {
 classifier = 'exec'
}
runesr
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