Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.
Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.
Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.
Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:
1. Overview
Gradle is a multi-purpose automation build tool to develop, compile, and test software packages. It supports a wide range of languages, but primarily, we use it for Java-based languages like Kotlin, Groovy, and Scala.
While working with Java, we might need to customize the JVM arguments in a Java application. As we are using Gradle to build a Java application, we can also customize the JVM arguments of the application by tuning the Gradle configuration.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn to pass the JVM arguments from the Gradle bootRun to a Spring Boot Java application.
2. Understanding bootRun
Gradle bootRun is a gradle-specified task that comes with the default Spring Boot Gradle Plugin. It helps us to run the Spring Boot application from Gradle itself directly. Executing the bootRun command starts our application in a development environment, which is very useful for testing and development purposes. Primarily, it is used for iterative development as it doesn’t need any separate build or deployment purposes.
In short, it provides a simplified way to build an application in a dev environment and execute tasks related to spring boot development.
3. Using jvmArgs in build.gradle File
Gradle provides a straightforward way to add JVM args to the bootRun command using the build.gradle file. To illustrate, let’s look at the command to add JVM args to a spring boot application using the bootRun command:
bootRun {
jvmArgs([
"-Xms256m",
"-Xmx512m"
])
}As we can see, the max/min heap of the springboot application is modified using the jvmArgs option. Now, let’s verify the JVM changes to the spring boot application using the ps command:
$ ps -ef | grep java | grep spring
502 7870 7254 0 8:07PM ?? 0:03.89 /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.0.2.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
-XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 -Xms256m -Xmx512m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Duser.country=IN
-Duser.language=en com.example.demo.DemoApplicationIn the above bootRun task, we changed the max and min heap of the Spring Boot application using the jvmArgs option. This way, the JVM parameter will be attached to the Spring Boot application dynamically. Furthermore, we can also add customized properties to the bootRun using the -D option. To demonstrate, let’s take a look at the bootRun task:
bootRun {
jvmArgs(['-Dbaeldung=test', '-Xmx512m'])
}This way, we can pass both the JVM options and custom property attributes. To illustrate, let’s verify the custom value with the jvm arguments:
$ ps -ef | grep java | grep spring
502 8423 7254 0 8:16PM ?? 0:00.62 /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.0.2.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
-XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 -Dbaeldung=test -Xms256m -Xmx512m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Duser.country=IN
-Duser.language=en com.example.demo.DemoApplicationIn addition, we can also put these properties files into gradle.properties and then use them in the build.gradle:
baeldung=test
max.heap.size=512mNow, we can use it in the bootRun command:
bootRun {
jvmArgs([
"-Dbaeldung=${project.findProperty('baeldung')}",
"-Xmx${project.findProperty('max.heap.size')}"
])
}Using the above way we can separate the configuration file from the main build.gradle file.
4. Using Command-Line Arguments
We can also provide JVM options directly to the ./gradlew bootRun command. In Gradle, system properties can be specified with the -D flag, and JVM options can be specified using -X:
$ ./gradlew bootRun --args='--spring-boot.run.jvmArguments="-Xmx512m" --baeldung=test'We can use this command to supply JVM options dynamically at runtime without modifying the Gradle build file. To demonstrate, let’s verify the JVM arguments using the ps command:
$ ps -ef | grep java | grep spring
502 58504 90399 0 7:21AM ?? 0:02.95 /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.0.2.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java
-XX:TieredStopAtLevel=1 -Xms256m -Xmx512m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Duser.country=IN -Duser.language=en
com.example.demo.DemoApplication --spring-boot.run.jvmArguments=-Xmx512m --baeldung=testThe above command directly sets the jvm arguments using the ./gradlew bootRun command.
5. Conclusion
In this article, we learned different ways to pass the JVM options to the bootRun command.
First, we learned the importance and basic usage of bootRun. We then explored the use of command line arguments and the build.gradle file to supply the JVM options to bootRun.
