3.7. External artifacts

It is not recommended to store binary files in a source repository. Therefore, you must define a build which pulls additional files, such as Java .jar dependencies, during the build process. How this is done depends on the build strategy you are using.

For a Source build strategy, you must put appropriate shell commands into the assemble script:

#!/bin/sh
APP_VERSION=1.0
wget http://repository.example.com/app/app-$APP_VERSION.jar -O app.jar

#!/bin/sh
exec java -jar app.jar

For a Docker build strategy, you must modify the Dockerfile and invoke shell commands with the RUN instruction:

FROM jboss/base-jdk:8

ENV APP_VERSION 1.0
RUN wget http://repository.example.com/app/app-$APP_VERSION.jar -O app.jar

EXPOSE 8080
CMD [ "java", "-jar", "app.jar" ]

In practice, you may want to use an environment variable for the file location so that the specific file to be downloaded can be customized using an environment variable defined on the BuildConfig, rather than updating the Dockerfile or assemble script.

You can choose between different methods of defining environment variables: