69. Supporting other build systems
If you want to use a build tool other than Maven, Gradle or Ant, you will likely need to develop your own plugin. Executable jars need to follow a specific format and certain entries need to be written in an uncompressed form (see the executable jar format section in the appendix for details).
The Spring Boot Maven and Gradle plugins both make use of spring-boot-loader-tools to actually generate jars. You are also free to use this library directly yourself if you need to.
To repackage an existing archive so that it becomes a self-contained executable archive use org.springframework.boot.loader.tools.Repackager. The Repackager class takes a single constructor argument that refers to an existing jar or war archive. Use one of the two available repackage() methods to either replace the original file or write to a new destination. Various settings can also be configured on the repackager before it is run.
When repackaging an archive you can include references to dependency files using the org.springframework.boot.loader.tools.Libraries interface. We don’t provide any concrete implementations of Libraries here as they are usually build system specific.
If your archive already includes libraries you can use Libraries.NONE.
If you don’t use Repackager.setMainClass() to specify a main class, the repackager will use ASM to read class files and attempt to find a suitable class with a public static void main(String[] args) method. An exception is thrown if more than one candidate is found.
Here is a typical example repackage:
Repackager repackager = new Repackager(sourceJarFile);
repackager.setBackupSource(false);
repackager.repackage(new Libraries() {
@Override
public void doWithLibraries(LibraryCallback callback) throws IOException {
// Build system specific implementation, callback for each dependency
// callback.library(new Library(nestedFile, LibraryScope.COMPILE));
}
});