NewRelic and SpringBoot with gradle

I thought of sharing on how we ended up having the NewRelic plugin for a SpringBoot applications. This was a dockerized SpringBoot-REST application. The newrelic agent is actually added as a javaagent plugin during the start process. I’ve seen some implementations where they had the newrelic-agent checked into the codebase or into a base docker image. Felt it was a code smell to take either way. So, this is what we did:

• Place the newrelic.yml in the root directory of the application.
• Added the below configurations and dependencies in the build.gradle.

configurations {
  //other configurations if any...
  newRelic
}
dependencies {
  newRelic group: 'com.newrelic.agent.java', name: 'newrelic-agent', version: '3.44.1'
}
task copyNewRelic(type: Copy) {
    from configurations.newRelic
    into "${project.buildDir}/libs"
    rename { it.substring(0, it.indexOf("-")) + it.substring(it.lastIndexOf("."), it.size()) }
}

assemble.dependsOn copyNewRelic

• Edited the Dockerfile to include the newrelic-agent. Please note that we are using docker labels to minimize the end docker image.

WORKDIR /deploy

EXPOSE 8080

ENTRYPOINT java -javaagent:newrelic.jar -Dspring.profiles.active=${PROFILES} -jar application.jar

COPY --from=builder /source/build/libs/ ./
COPY --from=builder /source/newrelic.yml ./

This ended up working like a charm. Please share if there are better ways to achieve this.

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