Spring DevTools not included in the fat jar packaged with spring-boot-maven-plugin

Question

I am trying to create a fat jar using spring-boot plugin. But it keeps giving me NoClassDefFound exception.

I have the following in my pom:

<dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
            <artifactId>httpclient</artifactId>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.httpcomponents</groupId>
            <artifactId>httpmime</artifactId>
        </dependency>

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>

    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <fork>true</fork>
                    <mainClass>${start-class}</mainClass>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>repackage</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

I package it using

mvn clean package spring-boot:repackage

,i also tried

mvn clean install spring-boot:repackage

When I try to run it later with

java -jar myapp.jar

It gives me the following exception

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/springframework/boot/devtools/filewatch/FileChangeListener
        at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods0(Native Method)
        at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredMethods(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethod(Unknown Source)
        at org.springframework.boot.loader.MainMethodRunner.run(MainMethodRunner.java:47)
        at org.springframework.boot.loader.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:87)
        at org.springframework.boot.loader.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:50)
        at org.springframework.boot.loader.JarLauncher.main(JarLauncher.java:51)
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.boot.devtools.filewatch.FileChangeListener
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        at org.springframework.boot.loader.LaunchedURLClassLoader.loadClass(LaunchedURLClassLoader.java:93)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
        ... 7 more

I tried everything i've found online as a solution and it doesn't work.

Answer 1

Added this:

<excludeDevtools>false</excludeDevtools>

To the spring-boot-maven-plugin:

<build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <fork>true</fork>
                    <excludeDevtools>false</excludeDevtools>
                    <mainClass>${start-class}</mainClass>
                </configuration>
                <executions>
                    <execution>
                        <goals>
                            <goal>repackage</goal>
                        </goals>
                    </execution>
                </executions>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>

Dev tools is excluded by default.