Chapter 1. Producing a native executable

You can produce a native executable from your Quarkus application using a container runtime such as Podman or Docker. Quarkus produces a binary executable using a builder image, which you can use together with the Red Hat Universal Base Images RHEL8-UBI and RHEL8-UBI minimal. Red Hat build of Quarkus 1.11 uses registry.access.redhat.com/quarkus/mandrel-20-rhel8:20.3 as a default for the quarkus.native.builder-image property.

The native executable for your application contains the application code, required libraries, Java APIs, and a reduced version of a virtual machine (VM). The smaller VM base improves the startup time of the application and produces a minimal disk footprint.

Procedure

  1. Open the Getting Started project pom.xml file and verify that it includes the native profile: 

    <profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>native</id>
        <properties>
            <quarkus.package.type>native</quarkus.package.type>
        </properties>
    </profile>
</profiles>
    Note

    Using Quarkus native profile allows you to run both the native executable and the native image tests.

  2. Build a native executable using one of the following methods:

    1. Build a native executable with Docker: 

      ./mvnw package -Pnative -Dquarkus.native.container-build=true

    2. Build a native executable with Podman: 

      ./mvnw package -Pnative -Dquarkus.native.container-build=true -Dquarkus.native.container-runtime=podman

      These commands create the getting-started-*-runner binary in the target directory.

      Important

      Compiling a Quarkus application to a native executable consumes a lot of memory during analysis and optimization. You can limit the amount of memory used during native compilation by setting the quarkus.native.native-image-xmx configuration property. Setting low memory limits might increase the build time. For more details, refer to Native executable configuration properties.

  3. Run the native executable: 

    ./target/getting-started-*-runner

    When you build the native executable the prod profile is enabled and the Quarkus native tests run using the prod profile. You can change this using the quarkus.test.native-image-profile property.