General Guide to Deploying a Spring Boot Microservice Project with Maven

With the popularity of Spring Boot and Spring Cloud, many companies adopt microservice architectures; this article explains a generic deployment method for such projects.

1. Project Analysis

The example project contains modules business, file, gateway, generator, server, and system; only modules that have a main class (business, file, gateway, system) need to be packaged.

Below is the parent <project>... pom file, which defines the project structure, required plugins (maven-compiler-plugin, maven-surefire-plugin) and sets the packaging type to pom.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 https://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <groupId>com.lsu</groupId>
    <artifactId>online-course</artifactId>
    <packaging>pom</packaging>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
    <modules>
        <module>system</module>
        <module>gateway</module>
        <module>server</module>
        <module>business</module>
        <module>generator</module>
        <module>file</module>
    </modules>
    ...
</project>

2. Packaging the Project

2.1 Parent pom

Specify maven-compiler-plugin and maven-surefire-plugin in the <build><plugins> section.

Set <packaging>pom</packaging> for the parent project.

2.2 Child pom (example: business module)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
    <parent>
        <artifactId>online-course</artifactId>
        <groupId>com.lsu</groupId>
        <version>1.0.0</version>
    </parent>
    <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
    <packaging>jar</packaging>
    <artifactId>business</artifactId>
    ...
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <mainClass>com.lsu.business.BusinessMainApplication</mainClass>
                    <layout>ZIP</layout>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>repackage</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</project>

Specify spring-boot-maven-plugin and the fully‑qualified main class.

Set <packaging>jar</packaging> for the module.

2.3 Execute packaging

Run mvn package (via IDEA’s Maven plugin or command line). The built JAR files appear in each module’s target directory.

Start a service with java -jar business-1.0.0.jar.

3. Deploy the Project

Copy the JARs to a Windows Server 2012 or Linux host that already has Java installed, then launch them with the java -jar command.

For the front‑end, use a multi‑environment configuration (e.g., .env.dev) and run the build script defined in package.json with the --mode dev flag. The build generates a dist directory which can be served by http-server or Nginx.

Additional notes: install http-server globally via cnpm install http-server -g, then execute it inside the dist folder to view the application.

The remainder of the source contains promotional messages for a ChatGPT community, giveaway links, and various unrelated article recommendations, which are not part of the technical guide.