Building JavaFx application using Bitbucket pipelines

Question

I am trying to build JavaFx project using bitbucket pipelines. For that I am using maven:3-jdk-8 docker image. This Docker image uses OpenJDK 8 instead of Oracle's one (due to the lincensing issue) which does not include the JavaFx part. Note that I have to use Java 8 to build my project! Problem that I am getting is that I am not able to build the application using that docker image alone.

As proposed in an answer to the same question (https://stackoverflow.com/a/40167253/2000338): I tried using this bitbucket-pipelines.yml to try to overcome the situation:

image: maven:3-jdk-8

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        script: # Modify the commands below to build your repository.
          - apt-get update
          - apt-get install -y openjfx
          - mvn clean install # -B batch mode makes Maven less verbose

In step 2 it seems that openjfx is installed properly. But in step 3 I am getting following error:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.maven.plugins:maven-compiler-plugin:3.8.0:compile (default-compile) on project ***********: Compilation failure: Compilation failure: 
[ERROR] /opt/atlassian/pipelines/agent/build/src/main/java/********/******/****/MainFx.java:[7,26] package javafx.application does not exist

It seams that it is still complaining on the JavaFx libraries missing, but I am not aware of why. On my developer machine (Windows 7, jdk1.8.0_221) I can execute maven build without an issue.

Answer 1

What was missing in previous approach is that the javafx library was not on the classpath. Basically in order to make maven build work I had to add the jfxrt.jar to the classpath. I found that in the maven:3-jdk-8 image after installing javafx the library can be found in: /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar

Adding this file to a classpath during build run will do the trick.

One idea (that worked for me) is to include this library in application pom/dependecy part as a system scope.

In my case I made a maven profile for that:

    <profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>docker_build</id>
        <activation>
            <activeByDefault>false</activeByDefault>
        </activation>
        <dependencies>
            <dependency>
                <groupId>com.oracle</groupId>
                <artifactId>javaFX</artifactId>
                <version>2.2</version>
                <scope>system</scope>
                <systemPath>${javafx-location}</systemPath>
            </dependency>
        </dependencies>
    </profile>
</profiles>

In order to run this maven build you have to issue proper maven command to add this profile. E.g.

mvn clean install -P docker_build -Djavafx-location=/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar

To simplify this I made a Docker image using following Dockerfile:

FROM maven:3-jdk-8
RUN apt-get update && \
    apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends openjfx
COPY settings.xml /root/.m2/

which uses following maven settings.xml file:

<settings xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0"
          xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/SETTINGS/1.0.0
                      https://maven.apache.org/xsd/settings-1.0.0.xsd">
    <localRepository>/usr/share/maven/ref/repository</localRepository>
    <activeProfiles>
        <activeProfile>docker_build</activeProfile>
    </activeProfiles>
    <profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>docker_build</id>
        <properties>
            <javafx-location>/usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/lib/ext/jfxrt.jar</javafx-location>
        </properties>
        </profile>
    </profiles>
</settings>

I also published it to the Docker hub if somebody may find it useful: https://hub.docker.com/r/brzigonzales/maven-javafx