How can I reduce the size of fat jar?

[copper rapids]

I have an application that uses javafx and jsoup, and when exporting the jar file using shadow jar it weighs 8.7 mb, but I think this is too much for a very lightweight application.
Is there any way to reduce the size of this file, or any gradle plugins?(preferably for 24 java, but not necessary)

[celest elm]

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[tough trout]

Are you building the same JAR for Windows, Linux and MacOS?

The biggest part of JavaFX are the native parts which are different for these

So instead of including them all in a single fat JAR, you can create three JARs

[copper rapids]

no, the jar I'm building is only suitable for linux

[tough trout]

yeah JavaFX is fairly big

I assume you are using Scene Builder?

[copper rapids]

unfortunately, I don't know what you're talking about(

[tough trout]

actually 8MB is very small for a JavaFX application

I wanted to know whether you are using FXML files

[copper rapids]

no, I'm not using FXML files

[tough trout]

javafx-controls is around 2.5MB and javafx-graphics is around 4.9MB

both of them are needed

You could ofc try some shrinking/dead code elimination but I think that would do almost nothing with JavaFX

Also JavaFX doesn't even support fat JARs

[tough trout]

like I don't even think native-image would reduce much

So no I don't think you can get much smaller with JavaFX

One thing you could do is not distributing any JAR file but a jlink image - that would be bigger but your users wouldn't need to install a JDK/JRE

[tough trout]

(that's the recommended way to package JavaFX applications as fat JARs aren't supported as mentioned earlier)

[copper rapids]

but I kinda made a working fat jar with javafx

[copper rapids]

if that's not possible, should I close this ticket?

[tough trout]

yes you can kinda get it working but classpath deployments are not supported

[tough trout]

I mean there are things you could try like an obfuscation/shrinking tool

that looks for things that aren't needed and removes them

but idk how well that would work

you could also try using native-image with the native-image agent but that would probably be quite a bit of work and might result in a bigger executable (though one that doesn't need Java to run)

[tough trout]

For that specifically - I'd close the post if you have no more questions about it - but you don't have to close it if you don't want to

[copper rapids]

are there any such tools for java 24? I've only found tools for 17

[tough trout]

proguard should support JDK 24 AFAIK

with version 9.1.10 or later

[copper rapids]

ok, thanks, I'll try again later, sorry I can't right now