Spring Boot application template

Purpose

The purpose of this template is to speed up the creation of new Spring applications within HMCTS and help keep the same standards across multiple teams. If you need to create a new app, you can simply use this one as a starting point and build on top of it.

What's inside

The template is a working application with a minimal setup. It contains:

• application skeleton
• setup script to prepare project
• common plugins and libraries
• HMCTS Java plugin
• docker setup
• automatically publishes API documentation to hmcts/cnp-api-docs
• code quality tools already set up
• MIT license and contribution information
• Helm chart using chart-java.

The application exposes health endpoint (http://localhost:4550/health) and metrics endpoint (http://localhost:4550/metrics).

Plugins

The template contains the following plugins:

• HMCTS Java plugin

  Applies code analysis tools with HMCTS default settings. See the project repository for details.

  Analysis tools include:

  • checkstyle

    https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/checkstyle_plugin.html

    Performs code style checks on Java source files using Checkstyle and generates reports from these checks. The checks are included in gradle's check task (you can run them by executing ./gradlew check command).

  • org.owasp.dependencycheck

    https://jeremylong.github.io/DependencyCheck/dependency-check-gradle/index.html

    Provides monitoring of the project's dependent libraries and creating a report of known vulnerable components that are included in the build. To run it execute gradle dependencyCheck command.

• jacoco

  https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/jacoco_plugin.html

  Provides code coverage metrics for Java code via integration with JaCoCo. You can create the report by running the following command:

    ./gradlew jacocoTestReport

  The report will be created in build/reports subdirectory in your project directory.

• io.spring.dependency-management

  https://github.com/spring-gradle-plugins/dependency-management-plugin

  Provides Maven-like dependency management. Allows you to declare dependency management using dependency 'groupId:artifactId:version' or dependency group:'group', name:'name', version:version'.

• org.springframework.boot

  http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/

  Reduces the amount of work needed to create a Spring application

• com.github.ben-manes.versions

  https://github.com/ben-manes/gradle-versions-plugin

  Provides a task to determine which dependencies have updates. Usage:

    ./gradlew dependencyUpdates -Drevision=release

Setup

Located in ./bin/init.sh. Simply run and follow the explanation how to execute it.

Building and deploying the application

Building the application

The project uses Gradle as a build tool. It already contains ./gradlew wrapper script, so there's no need to install gradle.

To build the project execute the following command:

  ./gradlew build

Running the application

Create the image of the application by executing the following command:

  ./gradlew assemble

Note: Docker Compose V2 is highly recommended for building and running the application. In the Compose V2 old docker-compose command is replaced with docker compose.

Create docker image:

  docker compose build

Run the distribution (created in build/install/spring-boot-template directory) by executing the following command:

  docker compose up

This will start the API container exposing the application's port (set to 4550 in this template app).

In order to test if the application is up, you can call its health endpoint:

  curl http://localhost:4550/health

You should get a response similar to this:

  {"status":"UP","diskSpace":{"status":"UP","total":249644974080,"free":137188298752,"threshold":10485760}}

Alternative script to run application

To skip all the setting up and building, just execute the following command:

./bin/run-in-docker.sh

For more information:

./bin/run-in-docker.sh -h

Script includes bare minimum environment variables necessary to start api instance. Whenever any variable is changed or any other script regarding docker image/container build, the suggested way to ensure all is cleaned up properly is by this command:

docker compose rm

It clears stopped containers correctly. Might consider removing clutter of images too, especially the ones fiddled with:

docker images

docker image rm <image-id>

There is no need to remove postgres and java or similar core images.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details