Jlink Plugin¶

This plugin builds on Java’s jlink tool to embed a JVM image (a stripped-down JRE) into your package. It produces a JVM image containing only the modules that are referenced from the dependency classpath.

Note: Current implementation only detects the platform modules (that is, the ones present in the JDK used to build the image). Modular JARs and directories are packaged as specified by the UniversalPlugin.

enablePlugins(JlinkPlugin)

The plugin requires Oracle JDK 11 or OpenJDK 11. Although jlink and jdeps are also a part of the older JDK versions, those lack some of the newer features, which was not addressed in the current plugin version.

This plugin must be run on the platform of the target installer. The tooling does not provide a means of creating, say, Windows installers on MacOS, or MacOS on Linux, etc.

The plugin analyzes the dependencies between packages using jdeps, and raises an error in case of a missing dependency (e.g. for a provided transitive dependency). The missing dependencies can be suppressed on a case-by-case basis (e.g. if you are sure the missing dependency is properly handled):

jlinkIgnoreMissingDependency := JlinkIgnore.only(
  "foo.bar" -> "bar.baz",
  "foo.bar" -> "bar.qux"
)

For large projects with a lot of dependencies this can get unwieldy. You can use a more flexible ignore strategy:

jlinkIgnoreMissingDependency := JlinkIgnore.byPackagePrefix(
  "foo.bar" -> "bar"
)

Otherwise you may opt out of the check altogether (which is not recommended):

jlinkIgnoreMissingDependency := JlinkIgnore.everything

Known issues¶

Adding some library dependencies can lead to errors like this:

java.lang.module.FindException: Module paranamer not found, required by com.fasterxml.jackson.module.paranamer

This is often caused by depending on automatic modules. In the example above, com.faterxml.jackson.module.paranamer is an explicit module (as in, it is a JAR with a module descriptor) that defines a dependency on the paranamer module. However, there is no explicit paranamer module - instead, Jackson expects us to use the paranamer JAR file as an automatic module. To do this, the JAR has to be on the module path. At the moment JlinkPlugin does not put it there automatically, so we have to do that ourselves:

jlinkModulePath := {
  // Get the full classpath with all the resolved dependencies.
  (jlinkBuildImage / fullClasspath).value
    // Find the ones that have `paranamer` as their names.
    .filter { item =>
      item.get(moduleID.key).exists { modId =>
        modId.name == "paranamer"
      }
    }
    // Get raw `File` objects.
    .map(_.data)
}

Jlink Plugin¶

Known issues¶

Further reading¶