<a href="./LICENSE.md"> <img src="./images/cc0.svg" alt="Creative Commons 0" align="right" width="10%" height="auto"/> </a>

Read the book!
(this jumps to the wiki)<br>
Jump to the project card wall
to see upcoming book and code changes (the card wall tracks Issues for the
project).

Some highlighted documentation pages:

• Keep local consistent with
  CI
• Shift security
  left

If you clone this project

Make sure you update the OWASP_API_NVD_KEY in your GitHub secrets.

Modern Java/JVM Build Practices

<a href="https://modernagile.org/" title="Modern Agile"> <img src="./images/modern-agile-wheel-english.png" alt="Modern Agile" align="right" width="20%" height="auto"/> </a>

[!WARNING]
For those using the DependencyCheck plugins for Gradle or Maven, over the
July 1st weekend the upstream API for fetching security CVEs changed a major
version, and stopped supporting older versions of the data.
To get up to date, update to at least version 10.0.2 of either the Gradle or
Maven plugin.

After the update, the first build will take a very long time, but should
perform normally afterwards.
And during the first week or so after this change, you may see multiple
connection failures as OWASP NVD is overloaded with projects all catching up
at the same time.
The Maven plugin shows progress as CVE records are pulled: to see progress
with the Gradle plugin, use the --info command-line flag.

Modern Java/JVM Build Practices is an article-as-repo on building modern
Java/JVM projects using
Gradle and
Maven, and a starter project
in Java (the advice works for non-Java languages on the JVM though details may
change).

[!IMPORTANT]
See the wiki for
all pages and sections.
This README is only introduction, motivation, and project status.
You can use the table of contents below to quickly
jump to bits that interest you.

Regardless of what language(s) or build tool(s) you choose, and you
should treat your build and your pipeline as worthy of your attention just as
you would your project source code:
If it doesn't build right for customers as it does for developers, you have
something to think about.

I'm showing you practices and tools that help you make your build and pipeline
to production as first-class the same as your own source code.
An example of this philosophy for a non-Java language is Clojure.

Your focus, and the focus of this article, is best build practices and
project hygiene, and helping you have local work that is identical in
production.
This project is agnostic between Gradle and Maven: discussion in each section
covers both tools (alphabetical order, Gradle before Maven).
See My Final Take on Gradle (vs.
Maven) for an opinionated view
(not my own).

This is not a JVM starter for only Java:
I use it for starting my Kotlin projects, and substitute complilation and code
quality plugins.
Any language on the JVM can find practices and tips.

[!NOTE]
Scala and Clojure have their own prefered build tools not covered here;
however, the advice and examples for your build pipeline are intended to
be just as helpful for those JVM languages.
Groovy and Kotlin can use the examples directly (they both tend towards the
Gradle option on build tools).

As a guide, this project focuses on:

• A quick starter for JVM projects using Gradle or Maven.
  Fork me,
  clone me, copy/paste
  freely!
  I am Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication
  (CC0).
• Discuss—and illustrate (through code)—sensible default practices;
  highlight good build tools and plugins
• Document pitfalls that turned up.
  Some were easy to address after Internet search; some were challenging
  (see "Tips" sections)
• Do not be an "all-in-one" solution. You know your circumstances best.
  I hope this project helps you discover build improvements you love.
  Please share with others through
  issues or
  PRs

Two recurring themes

• Shift problems left — Find issues earlier in your build—before
  you see them in production
• Make developer life easier — Automate build tasks often done by
  hand: get your build to complain (fail) locally before sharing with your
  team, or fail in CI before deployment

These can be summed up as a Software supply chain: ensuring reliable,
trusted software from local development through ready-to-deploy:
Build with confidence.

But ... you must judge and measure the advice here against your own
systems and processes.
Some things (many or most things) may work for you:
keep an eye for things that do not work for you.

What is a Starter?

A project starter has several goals:

• Help a new project get up and running with minimal fuss.
• Show examples of best practices.
• Explain the why for choices, and help you pick what makes most sense for
  your project.

This starter project is focused on build:

• Easy on-ramp for new folks to try out your project for themselves
• Support new contributors to your project that they become productive quickly
• Support current contributors in the build, get out of their way, and make
  everyday things easy

This starter project has minimal dependencies.
The focus is on Gradle and Maven plugins and configuration so that you and
contributors can focus on the code, not on setting up the build.

Summing up

• I'm not a great programmer; I'm just a good programmer with great habits.
  —
  Kent Beck
• Make it work, make it right, make it fast
  — C2 Wiki

[!NOTE]
NB — This is a living document.
The project is frequently updated to pick up new dependency or plugin
versions, and improved practices; the README.md and
wiki update
recommendations.
This is part of what great habits looks like: you do not just show love
for your developers and users, but enable them to feed back into projects
and help others.
See Reusing this
project
for tips on pulling in updates.

(Credit to Yegor Bugayenko for Elegant
READMEs.)

---

<a title="Try it"> <img src="./images/try.png" alt="Run from a local script" align="right" width="20%" height="auto"/> </a>

Try it

You should "kick the tires" and get a feel for what parts of this project
you'd like to pull into your own projects and builds.
You run across lots of projects:
Let's make this one helpful for you.

After cloning or forking this project to your machine, try out the local build
that makes sense for you:

shellCopy
$ earthly +build-with-gradle  # CI build with Earthly
$ earthly +build-with-maven  # CI build with Earthly
$ ./gradlew build  # Local-only build
$ ./mvnw verify  # Local-only build

Notice that you can run the build purely locally, or in a container?

I want to convince you that running your builds in a container fixes the "it
worked on my machine" problem, and show you how to pick up improvements for
your build that helps you and others be awesome.

[!NOTE]
This project uses NVD to check for CVEs with your dependencies which can
take a long time to download.
You can speed up your build time by requesting an NVD API
key (it can take quite
a while to fetch the CVEs list or update it, and may fail with 403 or 404
without a key).

When you request a key, NVD sends you an email to confirm your identity, and
then share an API key web page.
See Shift security
left
for more details.

See what the starter "run" program does:

Both Gradle and Maven (after building if needed) should print:

TheFoo(label=I AM FOOCUTUS OF BORG)

A "starter" program is the simplest of all possible "smoke
tests", meaning,
the minimal things just work, and when you check other things, maybe smoke
drifts from your computer as circuits burn out¹.

---

<a title="Changes"> <img src="./images/changes.png" alt="Changes" align="right" width="20%" height="auto"/> </a>

Recent significant changes

(For detailed changes in the example code, browse the commit
log.)

• Move to a CC0 license from Public Domain.
• Gradle: Bump to Gradle 8.9.
• Migrate most of the README.md to the GitHub project
  wiki.
  This is breaks up an overlong (14k+ words and growing) README into
  digestible sections.
• Earthly and Batect: Remove support for Batect as the author has archived
  that project.
  Please use Earthly for local containerized builds.
  So your local command line is:

  bashCopy
  $ earthly +build-with-gradle
  # OR
  $ earthly +build-with-maven

  I'll be researching other options, and updating to show those and examples.
  Advice remains the same: Run your local build in a container for
  reproducibility, and have CI do the same to exactly repeat your local
  builds.
• JVM: Move to JDK 21.
  This project has no sample code relying on recent/modern versions of Java or
  the JVM; however, moving between versions does need changes to build
  scripts and supporting files.
  Here is the last commit using JDK 17
• Gradle: Build with Gradle 8.x.
• Gradle: Bemove use of testsets plugin for integration testing in favor of
  native Gradle
  support.
  This supports Gradle 8.

---

<a title="Table of Contents"> <img src="./images/table-of-contents.png" alt="Table of Contents" align="right" width="20%" height="auto"/> </a>

Table of Contents

The writing for this project is fully moved to the wiki
pages.
Use the sidebar navigation in the wiki to browse or jump to topics, or to
follow in a reading order.
You can also use the droplist control next to "Pages" for an alphabetical
listing (including subheaders within pages), and for a search box.

Lastly, the wiki pages are themselves a repo, and you can clone it using
git@github.com:binkley/modern-java-practices.wiki.git as you can for any
GitHub wiki.

---

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Please file issues,
or contribute pull
requests!
I'd love a conversation with you.

---

Credits

Special thanks to my co-author, John Libby.

And many thanks to all the contributions from:

• Dan Wallach for multiple email reviews and
  discussions on security
• Kristoffer Haugsbakk
• Sam Gammon
• Sergei Bukharov

All suggestions and ideas welcome!
Please file an
issue. ☺

Footnotes

1. No, I'm just kidding.
   Amazon or Google or Microsoft cloud would have quite different problems than
   "white smoke" from computers². ↩

2. Actually, this really happened me in a data center before the cloud when
   a power supply burned out.
   We rushed to use a fire extinguisher before the Halon system triggered. ↩