Native mode

Things to consider before you run your application in native mode.

Character encodings

By default only the following Charsets are available in native mode (source):

Charset.defaultCharset(), US-ASCII, ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, UTF-16BE, UTF-16LE, UTF-16

If you expect your application to need any encoding not included in this set or if you see an UnsupportedCharsetException thrown in the native mode, please add the following entry to your application.properties:

quarkus.native.add-all-charsets = true

See also quarkus.native.add-all-charsets in Quarkus documentation.

Locale

Before GraalVM 21.1, only the building JVM’s default locale was included in the native image. Quarkus offered a way to set that locale via application.properties, so that you did not need to rely on LANG and LC_* environement variables:

quarkus.native.user-country=US
quarkus.native.user-language=en

Since GraalVM 21.1, there is a support for embedding multiple locales into the native image and for selecting the default locale via GraalVM command line options -H:IncludeLocales=fr,en, H:+IncludeAllLocales and -H:DefaultLocale=de. You can set those via Quarkus quarkus.native.additional-build-args property.

Embedding resources in the native executable

Resources accessed via Class.getResource(), Class.getResourceAsStream(), ClassLoader.getResource(), ClassLoader.getResourceAsStream(), etc. at runtime need to be explicitly listed for including in the native executable.

This can be done using Quarkus quarkus.native.resources.includes and quarkus.native.resources.excludes properties in application.properties file as demonstrated below:

quarkus.native.resources.includes = docs/*,images/*
quarkus.native.resources.excludes = docs/ignored.adoc,images/ignored.png

In the example above, resources named docs/included.adoc and images/included.png would be embedded in the native executable while docs/ignored.adoc and images/ignored.png would not.

resources.includes and resources.excludes are both lists of comma separated Ant-path style glob patterns. Please refer to Quarkus documentation for more details.

Using the onException clause in native mode

When using camel onException handling in native mode, it is the application developers responsibility to register exception classes for reflection.

For instance, having a camel context with onException handling as below:

onException(MyException.class).handled(true);
from("direct:route-that-could-produce-my-exception").throw(MyException.class);

The class mypackage.MyException should be registered for reflection, see more in Registering classes for reflection.

Registering classes for reflection

By default, dynamic reflection is not available in native mode. Classes for which reflective access is needed, have to be registered for reflection at compile time.

In many cases, application developers do not need to care because Quarkus extensions are able to detect the classes that require the reflection and register them automatically.

However, in some situations, Quarkus extensions may miss some classes and it is up to the application developer to register them. There are two ways to do that:

  1. The @io.quarkus.runtime.annotations.RegisterForReflection annotation can be used to register classes on which it is used, or it can also register third party classes via its targets attribute.

  2. The quarkus.camel.native.reflection options in application.properties:

    quarkus.camel.native.reflection.include-patterns = org.apache.commons.lang3.tuple.*
    quarkus.camel.native.reflection.exclude-patterns = org.apache.commons.lang3.tuple.*Triple

    For these options to work properly, the artifacts containing the selected classes must either contain a Jandex index ({@code META-INF/jandex.idx}) or they must be registered for indexing using the {@code quarkus.index-dependency.*} options in {@code application.properties} - e.g.

    quarkus.index-dependency.commons-lang3.group-id = org.apache.commons
    quarkus.index-dependency.commons-lang3.artifact-id = commons-lang3