Kotlin backend app boilerplate

kotlin

Introduction

I wrote a post on backend development in Kotlin some time back. After writing that post, I realised that for all my abandoned side projects I go through the same dance - set up maven and kotlin in intellij and get dependencies that end up being used in most projects.

I have been writing a lot more go code recently just because it is much easier to start on a go app than it is on a kotlin app. With Go - you can just do code main.go and start hacking away - it is a bit more work on the kotlin side to setup maven, dependencies and intellij.

I decided to spend some time and get a maven project with everything already included setup that allows me to git clone and get going.

Backend boilerplate

Getting a kotlin backend app started should be as easy as typing rails new but for v1 we can use git clone instead.

The repository is publically available here https://gitlab.com/asad-awadia/kotlin-server-app/ and can be cloned over https via git clone https://gitlab.com/asad-awadia/kotlin-server-app.git

It is a kotlin + maven project with the following already setup

  • JDBI for database manipulation
  • Ktorm as ORM
  • Javalin for http server
  • Lettuce as a redis client
  • Caffeine as an in memory cache
  • Unirest as an http client
  • Jib to create docker images [mvn compile jib:dockerBuild]
  • Maven assembly plugin to create fat jar [mvn package]
  • Codehaus to run the app directly from terminal [mvn clean compile exec:java]

Looking ahead

I hope to add more niceties such as logging, metrics & tracing etc in the future.