I recently had to deploy a Spring Boot application as a windows service and am surprised how easy it was using winsw. I’d previously written about using procrun – Java Programs as Windows Services, but winsw is much easier

Getting Started

There is a Section 59 of the Spring Boot documentation is about Installing Spring Boot applications, and points you towards a github page. This example uses that project for inspiration.

Project

Im going to use the Spring IO “Serving Web Content” project as a starting point, so go to the web page and download the example from git or as a zip file.

We can then see our application running –

Wrapping as a Windows Service

Download winsw from github – remember to choose the correct version depending on the version of .net you are running

Create windowsservice directory and copy the exe to this location

I renamed the gs-serving-web-content-0.1.0.jar to gs-serving-web-content.jar

Rename winsw exe from WinSW.NET4.exe to gs-serving-web-content.exe

Create a xml file named gs-serving-web-content.xml with the following content –

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <service> <id>gs-serving-web-content</id> <name>gs-serving-web-content</name> <description>gs-serving-web-content Windows Service</description> <executable>java</executable> <arguments>-jar "gs-serving-web-content.jar"</arguments> <logmode>rotate</logmode> </service>

We can then install with gs-serving-web-content.exe install (you may need to run as administrator)

We can then run this as a windows service –

Windows Service

To uninstall we run – gs-serving-web-content.exe uninstall

Alternatives

I looked at procrun as an alternative wrapper for Spring Boot – but couldnt get it to work. It probably can – but needs more time.

Conclusion

Im really impressed with winsw for installing Spring boot applications as windows services. Its really simple, and you can pass external application.properties files in through the xml configuration