How to pass JVM options from bootRun

I’m developing simple Spring web application that communicates with remote host and I would like to test it locally behind corporate proxy. I use “Spring Boot” gradle plugin and the question is how can I specify proxy settings for JVM?

I have try several ways to do it:

1. gradle -Dhttp.proxyHost=X.X.X.X -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 bootRun
2. export JAVA_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=X.X.X.X -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080"
3. export GRADLE_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=X.X.X.X -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080"

But it seems like none of them work – “NoRouteToHostException” throws in “network” code. Also, I have added some extra code to debug JVM start arguments:

    RuntimeMXBean runtimeMxBean = ManagementFactory.getRuntimeMXBean();
    List<String> arguments = runtimeMxBean.getInputArguments();
    for (String arg: arguments) System.out.println(arg);

And only one argument was printed: “-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8”.

If I set system property in code:

    System.setProperty("http.proxyHost", "X.X.X.X");
    System.setProperty("http.proxyPort", "8080");

Everything works just fine!

Answer

Original Answer (using Gradle 1.12 and Spring Boot 1.0.x):

The bootRun task of the Spring Boot gradle plugin extends the gradle JavaExec task. See this.

That means that you can configure the plugin to use the proxy by adding:

bootRun {
   jvmArgs = "-Dhttp.proxyHost=xxxxxx", "-Dhttp.proxyPort=xxxxxx"
}

to your build file.

Of course you could use the systemProperties instead of jvmArgs

If you want to conditionally add jvmArgs from the command line you can do the following:

bootRun {
    if ( project.hasProperty('jvmArgs') ) {
        jvmArgs project.jvmArgs.split('\s+')
    }
}

gradle bootRun -PjvmArgs="-Dwhatever1=value1 -Dwhatever2=value2"

Updated Answer:

After trying out my solution above using Spring Boot 1.2.6.RELEASE and Gradle 2.7 I observed that it was not working as some of the comments mention. However, a few minor tweaks can be made to recover the working state.

The new code is:

bootRun {
   jvmArgs = ["-Dhttp.proxyHost=xxxxxx", "-Dhttp.proxyPort=xxxxxx"]
}

for hard-coded arguments, and

bootRun {
    if ( project.hasProperty('jvmArgs') ) {
        jvmArgs = (project.jvmArgs.split("\s+") as List)

    }
}

for arguments provided from the command line