How I Fixed: Spring Boot Java Finished with non-zero exit value 1

I’m no Spring Boot expert. Far from it. However, in the project I am working on at the moment, there is a Spring Boot API created using Kotlin that I need to support.

Part of that challenge is just getting the API up and running. I’ve had a few days of head scratching with this one, but finally made some headway this afternoon.

So here’s what I was doing:

I open IntelliJ and start the app using the “Select Run / Debug Configuration”. In there I have a preset Gradle task that when I click the Big Green Play Sign ™, I was getting the following:

Execution failed for task ':bootRun'.
> Process 'command '/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-18.0.2.1.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java'' finished with non-zero exit value 1

* Try:
> Run with --info or --debug option to get more log output.
> Run with --scan to get full insights.

* Exception is:
org.gradle.api.tasks.TaskExecutionException: Execution failed for task ':bootRun'.
Caused by: org.gradle.process.internal.ExecException: Process 'command '/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-18.0.2.1.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/java'' finished with non-zero exit value 1
at org.springframework.boot.gradle.tasks.run.BootRun.exec(BootRun.java:90)Code language: Shell Session (shell)

As part of this, I could click the option to run with --info or --debug, and not shown above but another one I would get is --stacktrace. In fact, I think that is the flag I used in the command above. I just truncated the output.

Basically the error above is really … useless?

“Execution failed for task … java finished with non-zero exit value 1”

Great.

But why?

Well, I tried adding breakpoints around the app, but it didn’t seem to be doing very much at all.

Here’s what I had:

class MyKotlinSpringBootApplication {
    fun main(args: Array<String>) {
        SpringApplication.run(MyKotlinSpringBootApplication::class.java, *args)
    }
}Code language: Kotlin (kotlin)

But what really helped dive in further was to wrap that main application class in a try / catch block.

To do this in Kotlin I needed the following:

class MyKotlinSpringBootApplication {
    fun main(args: Array<String>) {
        try {
          SpringApplication.run(MyKotlinSpringBootApplication::class.java, *args)
      } catch (t: Throwable) {
        println(t.message);
        t.printStackTrace();
      }
    }
}Code language: Kotlin (kotlin)

On newer Spring Boot applications this may be different:

package com.example.demo

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication
import org.springframework.boot.runApplication

@SpringBootApplication
class DemoApplication

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
	try {
		runApplication<DemoApplication>(*args)
	} catch (t: Throwable) {
		println(t.message);
		t.printStackTrace();
	}
}Code language: Kotlin (kotlin)

After doing this, I got a much more helpful error message:

Caused by: org.springframework.beans.factory.UnsatisfiedDependencyException: Error creating bean with name 'someCustomService' defined in file Code language: Shell Session (shell)

At this point I’m still stuck, but I know I’m stuck because of some config. So I’m a lot further on in the debugging process.

Anyway, I hope this little code snippet helps you. I really have no idea how basic a fix this is, but I thought it wouldn’t harm anyone to share it.