Spring boot embedded container or war file in an external container for production

Question

I\'m complete able to configure spring boot in both cases, the question here is which of them are more robust and is the more recommended, because I didn\'t find in the spri

Answer 1

I don't know much about server kind of things, But my recommendation is

• If you are using Monolithic application, better to use war with external tomcat.

• If you are using for Micro Service applications, use embedded tomcat with different port. And each micro service applications are independent from each other.

Answer 2

About a month ago I had the question like yours. Let me share my conclusion:

1) JAR:

• You can run independently every appliction with different ports (in linux, java -jar ... > app_logs.log &) and you can route it (e.g. nginx). Note that, restarting is not problem. You can write custom bash script (like this: ps aux | grep appname and kill by PID)
• But there are some problems with configuring production app. Property files will archived into jar.

2) WAR

• You can deploy into container and just run it. Easy managing at the server. If you want to re-configure app, open properties file from unarchived folder inside container, change it as need and restart container. So, managing and configuring will be easy.
• But, if you want to run another app in this server with another port, then you must install another copy of container and config it.

So, in my practice, using war app easier than jar to manage and re-configure.

Answer 3

1. I don't know that much about Windows services but on Linux you can add the execution of a jar to a RC-Scripts (and thus make the application start at a certain run-level). For a spring boot app you just have to symlink to the jar and you can start/stop/etc like any other service, see: Spring Boot application as a Service

2. restart the machine or the JVM? A shutdown mechanism is built into spring boot, you just have to activate it (and you should enable security machanism so that not anybody can do that), see: How to shutdown a Spring Boot Application in a correct way?

3. Spring-Boot enables microservices - so the idea is to have one embedded webapp-container for each webapp/microservice. This reduces the risk of losing all services when only one is going down.

4. Yes. and you have to execute catalina.sh|bat start after every restart. Or you add an appropriate startup script (see 1.)

I sense that you'd rather do it the old-fashioned way. Despite the 'matter of taste' answer, there is one argument pro-jar: the only dependency is the JVM! The rest (the web-app-container, db-drivers, other libraries) is all part of the package you deliver. And if you decide to change the container for the next release, so will it be.

Answer 4

jar packaging is perfectly suitable for production and you should rather fallback to war only if you really have to - which is often the case when you cannot control your deployment environment (which is often the case in large enterprises).

There is a chapter in Spring Boot Reference about setting up Spring Boot based application as a Unix/Linux/Windows service: Installing Spring Boot applications.

Regarding your concern:

Maybe in the future I need more applications in the same container.

With embedded containers if you need more applications running on the same machine, you should start two applications separately, each running on different port and effectively you will end up with two containers running - which is good, applications are better isolated from each other.

Answer 5

One more reason to use "war" file in production. Springboot masked an error Jetty threw whereas WAR deployed in Jetty correctly caught it ( though issue below is still under review )

https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/8917#issuecomment-294673487