Cloud Native is a style of application development that encourages easy adoption of best practices in the areas of continuous delivery and value-driven development. A related discipline is that of building 12-factor Apps in which development practices are aligned with delivery and operations goals, for instance by using declarative programming and management and monitoring. Spring Cloud facilitates these styles of development in a number of specific ways and the starting point is a set of features that all components in a distributed system either need or need easy access to when required.

Many of those features are covered by Spring Boot, which we build on in Spring Cloud. Some more are delivered by Spring Cloud as two libraries: Spring Cloud Context and Spring Cloud Commons. Spring Cloud Context provides utilities and special services for the ApplicationContext of a Spring Cloud application (bootstrap context, encryption, refresh scope and environment endpoints). Spring Cloud Commons is a set of abstractions and common classes used in different Spring Cloud implementations (eg. Spring Cloud Netflix vs. Spring Cloud Consul).

If you are getting an exception due to "Illegal key size" and you are using Sun’s JDK, you need to install the Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) Unlimited Strength Jurisdiction Policy Files. See the following links for more information:

• Java 6 JCE Link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce-6-download-429243.html

• Java 7 JCE Link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce-7-download-432124.html

• Java 8 JCE Link http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce8-download-2133166.html

Extract files into JDK/jre/lib/security folder (whichever version of JRE/JDK x64/x86 you are using).

Building

Basic Compile and Test

To build the source you will need to install JDK 1.7.

Spring Cloud uses Maven for most build-related activities, and you should be able to get off the ground quite quickly by cloning the project you are interested in and typing

$ ./mvnw install

Note	You can also install Maven (>=3.3.3) yourself and run the mvn command in place of ./mvnw in the examples below. If you do that you also might need to add -P spring if your local Maven settings do not contain repository declarations for spring pre-release artifacts.

Note

Be aware that you might need to increase the amount of memory available to Maven by setting a MAVEN_OPTS environment variable with a value like -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m. We try to cover this in the .mvn configuration, so if you find you have to do it to make a build succeed, please raise a ticket to get the settings added to source control.

For hints on how to build the project look in .travis.yml if there is one. There should be a "script" and maybe "install" command. Also look at the "services" section to see if any services need to be running locally (e.g. mongo or rabbit). Ignore the git-related bits that you might find in "before_install" since they’re related to setting git credentials and you already have those.

The projects that require middleware generally include a docker-compose.yml, so consider using Docker Compose to run the middeware servers in Docker containers. See the README in the scripts demo repository for specific instructions about the common cases of mongo, rabbit and redis.

Note	If all else fails, build with the command from .travis.yml (usually ./mvnw install).

Documentation

The spring-cloud-build module has a "docs" profile, and if you switch that on it will try to build asciidoc sources from src/main/asciidoc. As part of that process it will look for a README.adoc and process it by loading all the includes, but not parsing or rendering it, just copying it to ${main.basedir} (defaults to ${basedir}, i.e. the root of the project). If there are any changes in the README it will then show up after a Maven build as a modified file in the correct place. Just commit it and push the change.

Working with the code

If you don’t have an IDE preference we would recommend that you use Spring Tools Suite or Eclipse when working with the code. We use the m2eclipe eclipse plugin for maven support. Other IDEs and tools should also work without issue.

Importing into eclipse with m2eclipse

We recommend the m2eclipe eclipse plugin when working with eclipse. If you don’t already have m2eclipse installed it is available from the "eclipse marketplace".

Unfortunately m2e does not yet support Maven 3.3, so once the projects are imported into Eclipse you will also need to tell m2eclipse to use the .settings.xml file for the projects. If you do not do this you may see many different errors related to the POMs in the projects. Open your Eclipse preferences, expand the Maven preferences, and select User Settings. In the User Settings field click Browse and navigate to the Spring Cloud project you imported selecting the .settings.xml file in that project. Click Apply and then OK to save the preference changes.

Note	Alternatively you can copy the repository settings from .settings.xml into your own ~/.m2/settings.xml.

Importing into eclipse without m2eclipse

If you prefer not to use m2eclipse you can generate eclipse project metadata using the following command:

$ ./mvnw eclipse:eclipse

The generated eclipse projects can be imported by selecting import existing projects from the file menu.

Adding Project Lombok Agent

Spring Cloud uses Project Lombok to generate getters and setters etc. Compiling from the command line this shouldn’t cause any problems, but in an IDE you need to add an agent to the JVM. Full instructions can be found in the Lombok website. The sign that you need to do this is a lot of compiler errors to do with missing methods and fields, e.g.

The method getInitialStatus() is undefined for the type EurekaInstanceConfigBean    EurekaDiscoveryClientConfiguration.java /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/eureka   line 120    Java Problem
The method getInitialStatus() is undefined for the type EurekaInstanceConfigBean    EurekaDiscoveryClientConfiguration.java /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/eureka   line 121    Java Problem
The method setNonSecurePort(int) is undefined for the type EurekaInstanceConfigBean EurekaDiscoveryClientConfiguration.java /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/eureka   line 112    Java Problem
The type EurekaInstanceConfigBean.IdentifyingDataCenterInfo must implement the inherited abstract method DataCenterInfo.getName()   EurekaInstanceConfigBean.java   /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/eureka   line 131    Java Problem
The method getId() is undefined for the type ProxyRouteLocator.ProxyRouteSpec   PreDecorationFilter.java    /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/zuul/filters/pre line 60 Java Problem
The method getLocation() is undefined for the type ProxyRouteLocator.ProxyRouteSpec PreDecorationFilter.java    /spring-cloud-netflix-core/src/main/java/org/springframework/cloud/netflix/zuul/filters/pre line 55 Java Problem

Importing into Intellij

Spring Cloud projects use annotation processing, particularly Lombok, which requires configuration or you will encounter compile problems. It also needs a specific version of maven and a profile enabled. Intellij 14.1+ requires some configuration to ensure these are setup properly.

1. Click Preferences, Plugins. Ensure Lombok is installed

2. Click New, Project from Existing Sources, choose your spring-cloud-sleuth directory

3. Choose Maven, and select Environment Settings. Ensure you are using Maven 3.3.3

4. In the next screen, Select the profile spring click Next until Finish.

5. Click Preferences, "Build, Execution, Deployment", Compiler, Annotation Processors. Click Enable Annotation Processing

6. Click Build, Rebuild Project, and you are ready to go!

Importing into other IDEs

Maven is well supported by most Java IDEs. Refer to you vendor documentation.

Contributing

Spring Cloud is released under the non-restrictive Apache 2.0 license, and follows a very standard Github development process, using Github tracker for issues and merging pull requests into master. If you want to contribute even something trivial please do not hesitate, but follow the guidelines below.

Sign the Contributor License Agreement

Before we accept a non-trivial patch or pull request we will need you to sign the contributor’s agreement. Signing the contributor’s agreement does not grant anyone commit rights to the main repository, but it does mean that we can accept your contributions, and you will get an author credit if we do. Active contributors might be asked to join the core team, and given the ability to merge pull requests.

Code Conventions and Housekeeping

None of these is essential for a pull request, but they will all help. They can also be added after the original pull request but before a merge.

• Use the Spring Framework code format conventions. If you use Eclipse you can import formatter settings using the eclipse-code-formatter.xml file from the Spring Cloud Build project. If using IntelliJ, you can use the Eclipse Code Formatter Plugin to import the same file.

• Make sure all new .java files to have a simple Javadoc class comment with at least an @author tag identifying you, and preferably at least a paragraph on what the class is for.

• Add the ASF license header comment to all new .java files (copy from existing files in the project)

• Add yourself as an @author to the .java files that you modify substantially (more than cosmetic changes).

• Add some Javadocs and, if you change the namespace, some XSD doc elements.

• A few unit tests would help a lot as well — someone has to do it.

• If no-one else is using your branch, please rebase it against the current master (or other target branch in the main project).

• When writing a commit message please follow these conventions, if you are fixing an existing issue please add Fixes gh-XXXX at the end of the commit message (where XXXX is the issue number).