Spring Boot application as a windows service

In this Blog, I will try to illustrate steps to run Spring Boot application as a Windows Service.

To run Spring Boot application as a windows service we will be using
 winsw: Windows service wrapper

Please follow below mentioned steps

Step1: Check out the version of Microsoft .NET framework to determine correct winsw version for the windows operating system.

To check Microsoft.NET framework version, Navigate to command prompt and run below mentioned command as shown below

reg query "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v4\full" /v version

If your .NET framework version is less than 3.5 then we need to download winsw v2.1.1 else we can download winsw v2.1.2

Step2: Download the winsw and prepare required directory structure.

We can download the winsw from below mentioned link

https://github.com/kohsuke/winsw/releases

From the above mentioned git hub repository download the WinSW.NET4.exe and sample-minimal.xml to a directory and name it “spring-boot-service”

Also rename WinSW.NET4.exe and sample-minimal.xml to spring-boot-service.exe and spring-boot-service.xml

Place  your application war in the same folder (for example spring-boot-service.war)

Modify the spring-boot-service.xml file with proper values

As shown in above screen shot, give unique id for your service (For ex : spring-boot-service)

For the "executable" property give value till JAVA_HOME/java (i.e. folder where your java.exe file is present)

set the argument property as shown below

<arguments>-Dserver.port=9002 -Duser.timezone=UTC -Xms1024m -Xmx2048m -Dlogging.root=C:\test\spring-boot-service\logs\  -jar spring-boot-service.war</arguments> 

Step3: winsw installation and configuration set up

             Open command prompt as an administrator and navigate to directory where you placed winsw installation and configuration file as explained in the Step1 (for example spring-boot-service folder)

i) Execute spring-boot-service.exe install 

ii)                 Open windows “Services” as Administrator –

For Example in Windows 7, following is navigation path to launch windows Services

Start -> Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools -> Services(Run as Administrator)

i)                 Now in the Services Window, select the service, right click and start

or in the command prompt run net start <service-name>

 where service-name is unique id which you given in service.xml file

To delete a process run below sc command

sc delete <service name>