3 Ways to Build Docker Images for Spring Boot Applications

I have three mechanisms in the same pom file which are put under different maven profiles.

Tech Stack

• Java 25
• Spring Boot 4.1.1
• Maven 3.10 (via the Maven Wrapper ./mvnw)
• Base images: amazoncorretto:25 / amazoncorretto:25-alpine3.22 (JIB & Fabric8), Paketo buildpacks with BP_JVM_VERSION=25 (Spring Boot plugin)

Prerequisites

• JDK 25
• Docker (running locally) for building images

Build & Run Locally

./mvnw clean verify
./mvnw spring-boot:run

Building Docker Images

• Building Image with Spring Boot Build Plugin (produces docker.io/hendisantika/docker-without-docker:0.0.2):

  ./mvnw clean verify spring-boot:build-image

• Building Image with Fabric8 (produces spring-boot-docker-without-docker:0.0.2):

  ./mvnw clean verify -DskipTests -Pbuild-with-fabric-8

• Building Image with JIB (produces jib-build-spring-boot-docker-without-docker:0.0.2):

  ./mvnw clean verify -DskipTests -Pbuild-with-jib

• Push Image to Docker Hub:

  ./mvnw clean verify -DskipTests -Pdockerhub

Start the container

docker run --name spring-boot-docker-without-docker -p 8080:8080 spring-boot-docker-without-docker:0.0.2

APIs for testing

1st: http://localhost:8080/api/v1/customers

2nd: http://localhost:8080/api/v1/customers/male

CI/CD

The GitHub Actions workflow builds with Temurin JDK 25, builds images with all three mechanisms, pushes a multi-arch (linux/amd64, linux/arm64) image to Docker Hub tagged with the run number, then deploys it to the development server. It needs these repository secrets: DOCKERHUB_USERNAME, DOCKERHUB_TOKEN (a Docker Hub personal access token with Read & Write scope) and the SSH secrets used by the deploy job.