What is a fat JAR?

Question

I've heard people say that they create a fat JAR and deploy it. What do they actually mean ?

Answer 1

The fat jar is the jar, which contains classes from all the libraries, on which your project depends and, of course, the classes of current project.

In different build systems fat jar is created differently, for example, in Gradle one would create it with (instruction):

task fatJar(type: Jar) {
    manifest {
        attributes 'Main-Class': 'com.example.Main'
    }
    baseName = project.name + '-all'
    from { configurations.compile.collect { it.isDirectory() ? it : zipTree(it) } }
    with jar
}

In Maven it's being done this way (after setting up regular jar):

<pluginRepositories>
   <pluginRepository>
        <id>onejar-maven-plugin.googlecode.com</id>
        <url>http://onejar-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/mavenrepo</url>
   </pluginRepository>

<plugin>
    <groupid>org.dstovall</groupid>
    <artifactid>onejar-maven-plugin</artifactid>
    <version>1.4.4</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <configuration>
                <onejarversion>0.97</onejarversion>
                <classifier>onejar</classifier>
            </configuration>
            <goals>
                <goal>one-jar</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
   </executions>
</plugin>