Building and Running a Spring Native Application with GraalVM and Docker

What is Spring Native

Spring Native provides beta support for compiling Spring applications into native executables using the GraalVM native-image compiler, enabling lightweight container deployment and faster startup times compared to traditional JVM-based Spring Boot applications.

Environment Configuration

OS: Windows10 21H2
IDE: IntelliJ IDEA 2022.1.3
JDK: graalvm-ce-java11-22.2.0
Maven: 3.5.4
Docker Desktop for Windows: 4.12.0
Spring Boot: 2.7.4
Spring Native: 0.12.1

Spring Native applications should be compiled with Java 11 or Java 17.

Two Main Build Methods

Use Spring Boot Buildpacks to generate a lightweight container that includes the native executable.

Use the GraalVM native-image Maven plugin to produce a native executable directly.

Method 1 relies on the spring-boot-maven-plugin with the command mvn spring-boot:build-image , while Method 2 uses mvn -Pnative package after installing the native-image tool.

Key Differences

Environment Dependencies

Method 1 requires Docker.

Method 2 requires Visual Studio with specific components (MSVC, Windows 10 SDK).

Maven Commands

Method 1: mvn spring-boot:build-image

Method 2: mvn -Pnative package

Installing GraalVM and Native‑Image

Download GraalVM from https://www.graalvm.org/downloads/ and install the native‑image component with gu install native-image .

Creating a Spring Boot Project

A minimal pom.xml is provided, including dependencies for spring-boot-starter-web and spring-native , and plugin configuration that enables native image building via Buildpacks.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" ...>
  ...
  <properties>
    <java.version>11</java.version>
    <spring-native.version>0.12.1</spring-native.version>
  </properties>
  <dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>org.springframework.experimental</groupId>
      <artifactId>spring-native</artifactId>
      <version>${spring-native.version}</version>
    </dependency>
  </dependencies>
  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <image>
            <builder>paketobuildpacks/builder:tiny</builder>
            <env>
              <BP_NATIVE_IMAGE>true</BP_NATIVE_IMAGE>
            </env>
          </image>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.springframework.experimental</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-aot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>${spring-native.version}</version>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
</project>

Building the Native Image

Run the Maven commands:

mvn clean
mvn '-Dmaven.test.skip=true' spring-boot:build-image

The build process consumes significant CPU and memory, and the resulting Docker image can be inspected with docker images .

Running the Container

docker run -id -p 8888:8888 --name=native-app spring-native:0.0.1-SNAPSHOT 59178df9f49b

When started via Docker Desktop, the native Spring Boot application launches in about 31 ms and uses roughly 46 MB of memory, while the same application started with java -jar takes ~1.5 seconds and 238 MB.

References

Official Spring Native documentation: https://docs.spring.io/spring-native/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/index.html