Is it possible to make Lombok's builder public?

Question

I am using Lombok library in my project and I am not able to use a class annotated with @Builder in outer packages.

Is there a way to make the builder public?

MyClass instance = new MyClass.MyClassBuilder().build(); 

The error is:

'MyClassBuilder()' is not public in 'com.foo.MyClass.MyClassBuilder'. Cannot be accessed from outside package

Answer 1

@Builder already produces public methods, it's just the constructor that's package-private. The reason is that they intend for you to use the static builder() method, which is public, instead of using the constructor directly:

Foo foo = Foo.builder()     .property("hello, world")     .build(); 

If you really, really, really want the constructor to be public (there seems to be some suggestion that other reflection-based libraries might require it), then Lombok will never override anything that you've already declared explicitly, so you can declare a skeleton like this with a public constructor and Lombok will fill in the rest, without changing the constructor to package-private or anything.

@Builder public class Foo {     private final String property;      public static class FooBuilder     {         public FooBuilder() { }          // Lombok will fill in the fields and methods     } } 

This general strategy of allowing partial implementations to override default behaviour applies to most (maybe all) other Lombok annotations too. If your class is annotated with @ToString but you already declared a toString method, it will leave yours alone.

Just to show you everything that gets generated, I wrote the following class:

@Builder public class Foo {     private final String property; } 

I then ran it through delombok to see everything that was generated. As you can see, everything is public:

public class Foo {     private final String property;      @java.beans.ConstructorProperties({"property"})     Foo(final String property) {         this.property = property;     }      public static FooBuilder builder() {         return new FooBuilder();     }      public static class FooBuilder     {         private String property;          FooBuilder() { }          public FooBuilder property(final String property) {             this.property = property;             return this;         }          public Foo build() {             return new Foo(property);         }          public String toString() {             return "Foo.FooBuilder(property=" + this.property + ")";         }     } }