Paketo Buildpacks | Blog

Introducing the Liberty buildpack

Kevin Ortega
Monday, Apr 4, 2022

Open Liberty Logo

Liberty is finally available in Paketo and included in the java buildpack! Liberty is an open application framework designed for the cloud. It’s small, lightweight, and designed with modern cloud-native application development in mind.

With the Liberty buildpack, you can:

  • Build Java apps from source or a pre-configured on-prem Liberty
  • Install Liberty and user custom features
  • Install Liberty interim fixes
  • Create UBI-based OCI images

What do you need?

  • Your application source or a pre-configured on-prem Liberty
  • Docker
  • pack

Let’s get started!

The following examples use the Open Liberty starter application as the application source. Download the Open Liberty starter application:

git clone https://github.com/openliberty/guide-getting-started.git
cd guide-getting-started/start

If you’re new to buildpacks, I recommend you set a default builder as this removes the need to set a builder each time you build an image.

pack config default-builder gcr.io/paketo-buildpacks/builder:base

Build the application with a minimal footprint with only the Liberty features required to run the application and IBM Semeru OpenJ9:

 pack build --env BP_JAVA_APP_SERVER=liberty \
  --env BP_LIBERTY_PROFILE=jakartaee9 \
  --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/eclipse-openj9 --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/java myapp

Your application is now transformed into an OCI image!

Now what?

With your OCI image, you can run your application locally with the docker run command.

docker run --rm -p 9080:9080 myapp

or deploy your application to any Kubernetes-based platform, such as Red Hat OpenShift, by using an Open Liberty operator

Build your app from an on-prem Open Liberty installation

You can build from an on-prem Open Liberty installation by using a packaged Liberty server. Run the following command to package your server.

bin/server package defaultServer --include=usr

You can then supply the packaged server to the build by using the --path argument:

pack build --path <packaged-server-zip-path> \
 --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/eclipse-openj9 \
 --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/java myapp

Alternatively, you can build from a Liberty server installation by changing your working directory to the installation root that contains the wlp directory and running the following command:

pack build  \
 --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/eclipse-openj9 \
 --buildpack paketo-buildpacks/java myapp

Learn more: