spring-starter-terminal VS dockerfiles

There is probably much more that could be covered, but I think this is the most important once you know the basics. If you are new to Maven, suggest starting with an introduction like this. The guide covers creating projects as well, but many modern frameworks have easier and better generators. Spring Boot have its own initializer website, and I've made a CLI version. Quarkus also have a nice web UI you can use to create new projects.

Let's do something slightly different by demonstrating the usage of volumes and Ansible roles during build. It's not unusual to want to package an application into a container, and for simplicity we put it into the same directory as the playbook itself (so we can use the playbook_dir variable). To not make this example too advanced, we simply use a Spring Boot application made from Spring Initializr without any changes (if you prefer a terminal UI, there is one for that too). We'll use geerlingguys java role to setup Java to not boggle down the example with Java setup.

In the last article, building container images with Ansible was briefly discussed. An external blog article on that very subject was linked to, and if you read it you may have seen a lot of manual steps using Docker- and Buildah-commands. This seems like a lot of boiler plate code just to make container images with Ansible, right? From that idea, ansible-bender was born! Ansible-Bender uses Buildah to build your images, and Podman to handle them (some commands like pushing images, build logs, inspecting images etc. are included into Ansible-Bender). Buildah is a container image builder that does not depend on any external programs, and can build containers for any container runtime. A very big downside is that it's only supported on GNU/Linux-based systems, which is bad news if you are using Mac OS X (or god forbid if you are one of the Windows users, ugh). To combat this issue I made a Docker image that includes Buildah and all dependencies, that can be used to run Ansible-Bender on other platforms. Might be a bit slower than just using it on a GNU/Linux-based system, but beats not being able to use it at all!