[Untitled] – Micronaut Maven Plugin

Using Micronaut AOT

WARNING: The Micronaut AOT module is in experimental stages. Use at your own risk!

Micronaut AOT is a module which aims at pre-computing a number of things at build time in order to provide faster startup times and smaller binaries. At the moment, it supports optimizing Micronaut applications only (Micronaut libraries or functions will be supported in a future release).

To enable Micronaut AOT, simply set the property micronaut.aot.enabled, either in the POM or via the command-line:

$ mvn package -Dmicronaut.aot.enabled=true

When Micronaut AOT is enabled, the packaged (or exploded) format of the application will contain some optimizations computed at build time. It may contain, for example, additional classes, or even have different resources.

IMPORTANT: Micronaut AOT is a deployment optimization: it adds to build time, in order to make the final application faster to start, or the native images smaller. Therefore, if you use the AOT tasks during development, your feedback cycle will be slower (but the application will start faster). It is a good idea, however, to check the result of the optimization locally, similarly to what you’d do for a native image.

Currently, Micronaut AOT supports 2 runtimes: jit (the default) and native. To change it, use the micronaut.aot.runtime property. Note that if your packaging and micronaut.aot.runtime properties don’t match, the plugin will issue a warning in the build log:

$ mvn package -Dmicronaut.aot.enabled=true -Dpackaging=native-image

[INFO] --- mn:4.0.0:aot-sample-config (default-cli) @ demo ---
[WARNING] Packaging is set to [native-image], but Micronaut AOT runtime is set to [jit]. Please change them so that they match

Defining additional AOT dependencies

It is possible to add additional dependencies to the AOT execution classpath that may be required by some optimizations, or to include an external AOT optimizer (in the future, some modules such as micronaut-security may offer additional optimizers that can be used).

For example, the logback.xml.to.java optimization requires additional dependencies that can be defined in your POM as follows:

  <build>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>io.micronaut.maven</groupId>
        <artifactId>micronaut-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <aotDependencies>
            <dependency>
              <groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
              <artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId>
              <version>1.4.5</version>
            </dependency>
            <dependency>
              <groupId>org.fusesource.jansi</groupId>
              <artifactId>jansi</artifactId>
              <version>2.4.0</version>
            </dependency>
          </aotDependencies>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>

Configuration

Micronaut AOT can be configured with a .properties file. To get started with the possible options and their description, run the aot-sample-config goal:

$ mvn -Dmicronaut.aot.enabled mn:aot-sample-config

[INFO] ...
[INFO] Executing Micronaut AOT analysis
[INFO] Sample configuration file written to /my-app/target/aot/jit/aot.properties
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESS
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then, copy the target/aot/jit/aot.properties to your root directory, and adapt it to your needs. If using a different directory, use the micronaut.aot.config property to specify its location.

For a full list of configuration options, check the aot-analysis goal documentation.