Project Template: Create a Docker image for a Java application

A template project to create a Docker image for a Java application. The example application uses Quarkus to expose an HTTP endpoint.

Golang developer? Check out https://github.com/miguno/golang-docker-build-tutorial

Features:

• The Docker build uses a multi-stage build setup including a downsized JRE (built inside Docker via jlink) to minimize the size of the generated Docker image, which is 129MB.
• Supports Docker BuildKit
• Java 22 (Eclipse Temurin)
• JUnit 5 for testing, Jacoco for code coverage, SpotBugs for static code analysis
• Maven for build management, using Maven Wrapper
• Supports GraalVM to create native binaries for the example application. See Building a Native Exectuable in the Quarkus documentation. To keep things simple, the Docker setup of this project intentionally does not use these native app binaries because the majority of Java developers do not use GraalVM. If you do want to use native binaries, please modify Dockerfile accordingly.
• GitHub Actions workflows for Maven and Docker
• Optionally, uses just for running common commands conveniently, see justfile.
• Uses .env as central configuration to set variables used by justfile and other helper scripts in this project.

Requirements

Docker must be installed on your local machine. That's it. You do not need a Java JDK or Maven installed.

Usage and Demo

Step 1: Create the Docker image according to Dockerfile. This step uses Maven to build, test, and package the Java application according to pom.xml. The resulting image is 129MB in size, of which 44MB are the underlying alpine image.

# ***Creating an image may take a few minutes!***
$ docker build --platform linux/x86_64/v8 -t miguno/java-docker-build-tutorial:latest .

# You can also build with the new BuildKit.
# https://docs.docker.com/build/
$ docker buildx build --platform linux/x86_64/v8 -t miguno/java-docker-build-tutorial:latest .

Optionally, you can check the size of the generated Docker image:

$ docker images miguno/java-docker-build-tutorial
REPOSITORY                          TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED         SIZE
miguno/java-docker-build-tutorial   latest    6eeb79c07157   4 minutes ago   129MB

Step 2: Start a container for the Docker image.

$ docker run -p 8123:8123 miguno/java-docker-build-tutorial:latest

Step 3: Open another terminal and access the example API endpoint of the running container.

$ curl http://localhost:8123/status
{"status":"idle"}

Usage with just

If you have just installed, you can run the commands above more conveniently as per this project's justfile:

$ just
Available recipes:
    audit               # audit the code
    build               # alias for 'compile'
    build-native        # build the native application locally (requires GraalVM)
    clean               # clean (remove) the build artifacts
    compile             # compile the project
    coverage            # create coverage report
    default             # print available targets
    dev                 # run the application locally (in Quarkus development mode) with live reload
    docker-image-create # create a docker image (requires Docker)
    docker-image-run    # run the docker image (requires Docker)
    docker-image-size   # size of the docker image (requires Docker)
    evaluate            # evaluate and print all just variables
    format              # format sources
    format-check        # check formatting of sources (without modifying)
    infer               # static code analysis with infer (requires https://github.com/facebook/infer)
    package             # package the application to create an uber jar
    pom                 # print effective pom.xml
    run                 # run the application locally
    run-native          # run the native application locally (requires GraalVM)
    send-request-to-app # send request to the app's HTTP endpoint (requires Docker and running app container)
    site                # generate site incl. reports for spotbugs, dependencies, javadocs, licenses
    spotbugs            # static code analysis with spotbugs
    system-info         # print system information such as OS and architecture
    test                # run unit tests
    upgrade-mvnw        # upgrade mvnw a.k.a. maven wrapper
    verify              # run unit and integration tests, plus coverage check and static code analysis
    verify-native       # same as 'verify', but for the native application (requires GraalVM)

Example:

$ just docker-image-create

Notes

You can also build, test, package, and run the Java application locally (without Docker) if you have JDK 22+ installed. You do not need to have Maven installed, because this repository contains the Maven Wrapper mvnw (use mvnw.cmd on Windows).

# Build, test, package the application locally.
$ ./mvnw clean verify package

# Run the application locally.
$ java -jar target/app-runner.jar

# Alternatively, you can run the application in development mode with hot reloading.
$ ./mvnw quarkus:dev

References

• How to reduce Java Docker image size (with jlink)
• Creating your own runtime using jlink
• Using Jlink in Dockerfiles instead of a JRE