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Build a Project

Make a production build of your Vaadin application.

Up to this point, the walking skeleton has been running in development mode. Once you’ve added meaningful features, you can deploy your application to production. To do that, you have to make a production build. The build gathers necessary frontend resources and dependencies. It then transpiles, minimizes and bundles them to make the application load faster.

Make a Production Build

In the walking skeleton, you use the Vaadin Maven plugin to make a production build. You do this by activating the production profile, like this:

Source code
bash
./mvnw clean package -Pproduction
bash
powershell
powershell

Once the build has finished, check the target directory. If your skeleton was named my-application, you should find a file called my-application-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.

The production profile not only builds the frontend, but also excludes the development server bundle since it contains features that aren’t used in production.

Build a Docker Image

The walking skeleton includes a Dockerfile that allows you to package your application as a Docker image.

Important
Install Docker
You must install Docker on your system before you can build an image.

Run the following command from your project root to build the image:

Source code
terminal
docker build -t my-application:latest .

This command builds your application in production mode and produces a Docker image tagged my-application:latest.

Building with Commercial Components

If your application uses commercial components, you need a licence key.

When building locally with Maven, the Vaadin Maven plugin detects the license automatically. For Docker builds, you must pass the key explicitly as a secret:

Source code
bash
docker build -t my-application:latest --secret id=proKey,src=$HOME/.vaadin/proKey .
bash
powershell
powershell

If you need to use an offline key, you can pass it like this:

Source code
bash
docker build -t my-application:latest --secret id=offlineKey,src=$HOME/.vaadin/offlineKey .
bash
powershell
powershell
Note
A Peek Under the Hood

The --secret option works because the provided Dockerfile in the walking skeleton mounts the files, parses them and passes them on to Maven:

Source code
docker
# (Previous build steps omitted for brevity)
# ...

RUN --mount=type=cache,target=/root/.m2 \
    --mount=type=secret,id=proKey \
    --mount=type=secret,id=offlineKey \
    sh -c 'PRO_KEY=$(jq -r ".proKey // empty" /run/secrets/proKey 2>/dev/null || echo "") && \
    OFFLINE_KEY=$(cat /run/secrets/offlineKey 2>/dev/null || echo "") && \
    ./mvnw clean package -Pproduction -DskipTests -Dvaadin.proKey=${PRO_KEY} -Dvaadin.offlineKey=${OFFLINE_KEY}'

For more information about build secrets in Docker, see the Docker documentation.