Running Multiple Spring Boot Apps in the Same JVM

In the last week or so, I was playing a little bit with microservices (hey! a buzzword!), and I used Spring Boot to create those services. On of my first questions was: How can I test a set of services from a business point of view with a single click in my IDE - I.e. how can I ensure that the complete application has the right features? I wanted a way to start multiple Spring Boot web applications in the same JVM. Here is how I did it.

All of this is a work in progress, so I don’t have some complete code for you on github. I will maybe write a more in-depth, step-by-step guide how I created this application later on quickglance.at. And this guide will then come with a complete example application. If I ever write it ;)

The Problem

I wanted to create an application that handles location data. It would consist of three services: One to write locations (“locations-command”, one to read them (“locations-query”) and a web application. You see, we are doing CQRS here (another buzzword!).

The web application contains only Spring WebMVC controllers and ViewModels (add MVVM to the list of buzzwords…). It calls the locations-query or locations-command service to do the real work. Those services would then use some storage backend to store and retrieve locations - Probably couchbase, but I have not decided yet.

I want to test this application from a business point of view using “executable specifications” written in FitNesse. I want to run those tests either in FitNesse or with JUnit from within my IDE. But I do not want to build and run a set of docker containers every time - I want to run the tests all in the same IDE, so I start them with a single click and debug them if necessary.

I also don’t want those tests to use the real storage backend. I want to be able to mock backend calls, and only test against the real database in a separate set of tests (which would then really spin up all those docker containers). I have not completely solved this part yet, so I’ll not cover it here. Maybe in a later blog post…

Third, I want that all the services to use port 8080 when they run in their own docker container - I don’t want to customize ports within the applicatio