If you want to use a build tool other than Maven, Gradle, or Ant, you 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. If you need to, you may use this library directly.
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 by using the
org.springframework.boot.loader.tools.Libraries interface. We do not 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 do not use Repackager.setMainClass() to specify a main class, the repackager
uses ASM to read class files and tries 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.
The following example shows a typical repackage implementation:
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)); } });