Build from Source

This document describes how to build and import the Spring Framework into an IDE. You may also be interested to see Code Style and IntelliJ IDEA Editor Settings.

The Spring Framework uses a Gradle build. The instructions below use Gradle Wrapper from the root of the source tree. The wrapper script serves as a cross-platform, self-contained bootstrap mechanism for the build system.

Before You Start

To build you will need Git and JDK 8 update 20 or later. Be sure that your JAVA_HOME environment variable points to the jdk1.8.0 folder extracted from the JDK download.

Get the Source Code

git clone [email protected]:spring-projects/spring-framework.git
cd spring-framework

Build from the Command Line

To compile, test, build all jars, distribution zips, and docs use:

./gradlew build

The first time you run the build it may take a while to download Gradle and all build dependencies, as well as to run all tests. Once you've bootstrapped a Gradle distribution and downloaded dependencies, those are cached in your $HOME/.gradle directory.

Gradle has good incremental build support so run without clean to keep things snappy. You can also use the "-a" flag and the ":project" prefix to avoid evaluating and building other modules. For example, if iterating over changes in spring-webmvc, run with the following to evaluate and build only that module:

./gradlew -a :spring-webmvc:test

The Gradle daemon eliminates startup overhead. It's enabled by default but sometimes you may need to disable it. For example if building against JDK 9, you may encounter an Unrecognized VM option error which halts the build. To avoid that error, add org.gradle.jvmargs=-XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=1024m -Xmx1024m to the gradle.properties file in your gradle user home directory. See also GRADLE-3256 for details.

To install all Spring Framework jars into your local Maven cache (note that "-x" skips Javadoc generation):