I recently had to deploy a Spring Boot application as a windows service and am surprised how easy it was using winsw. I’d previously written about using procrun – Java Programs as Windows Services, but winsw is much easier
Getting Started
There is a Section 59 of the Spring Boot documentation is about Installing Spring Boot applications, and points you towards a github page. This example uses that project for inspiration.
Project
Im going to use the Spring IO “Serving Web Content” project as a starting point, so go to the web page and download the example from git or as a zip file.
We can then see our application running –
Wrapping as a Windows Service
- Download winsw from github – remember to choose the correct version depending on the version of .net you are running
- Create windowsservice directory and copy the exe to this location
- I renamed the gs-serving-web-content-0.1.0.jar to gs-serving-web-content.jar
- Rename winsw exe from WinSW.NET4.exe to gs-serving-web-content.exe
- Create a xml file named gs-serving-web-content.xml with the following content –
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <service> <id>gs-serving-web-content</id> <name>gs-serving-web-content</name> <description>gs-serving-web-content Windows Service</description> <executable>java</executable> <arguments>-jar "gs-serving-web-content.jar"</arguments> <logmode>rotate</logmode> </service>
- We can then install with gs-serving-web-content.exe install (you may need to run as administrator)
- We can then run this as a windows service –
Windows Service
- To uninstall we run – gs-serving-web-content.exe uninstall
Alternatives
I looked at procrun as an alternative wrapper for Spring Boot – but couldnt get it to work. It probably can – but needs more time.
Conclusion
Im really impressed with winsw for installing Spring boot applications as windows services. Its really simple, and you can pass external application.properties files in through the xml configuration
| Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Martin Farrell, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Spring Boot as a Windows Service in 5 minutes Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
