fullstack-war-application

Example: build a full-stack Spring Boot WAR application with dedicated frontend and backend sub-projects

If you plan to serve your frontend with a Java backend (e.g. a Spring Boot application), you will probably use other Gradle plugins, such as the Gradle Java plugin, the Gradle WAR plugin, the Gradle Spring Boot plugin, or other ones of your choice.

In this configuration, you may package your full-stack application as a JAR/WAR artifact. To do so, the frontend must be assembled before the backend, and generally provided in a special directory for the backend packaging task (e.g. jar/war/bootJar/bootWar... tasks).

This example demonstrates how to configure a frontend sub-project whose package is included in a Spring Boot WAR artifact built in another sub-project.

Requirements

• A Gradle Wrapper configured in this directory.

Description

The frontend sub-project builds an index.html file in its build/www directory. A custom task named processFrontendResources, and defined in the backend sub-project copies the previous file in the build/resources/main/public directory of the backend sub-project. The processResources task of the backend sub-project depends on this processFrontendResources task, to ensure frontend artifacts are included when building the WAR artifact: the bootWar task in the backend project automatically packages files in the ${project.buildDir}/resources/main/public directory into the WAR artifact so as they are publicly accessible.

Finally:

• Enter gradlew bootRun on a command line.
• Open a browser, connect to URL http://localhost:8080, and see the following message displayed: "Hello from the frontend-gradle-plugin!".