Spring AOT inspects an application at build-time and generates an optimized version of it.
Based on your @SpringBootApplication-annotated main class, the AOT engine generates a persistent view of the beans that are going to be contributed at runtime in a way that bean instantiation is as straightforward as possible.
Additional post-processing of the factory is possible using callbacks.
For instance, these are used to generate the necessary reflection configuration that GraalVM needs to initialize the context in a native image.
To configure your application to use this feature, add an execution for the aot-generate goal, as shown in the following example:
link:../maven/aot/pom.xml[role=include]As the BeanFactory is fully prepared at build-time, conditions are also evaluated.
This has an important difference compared to what a regular Spring Boot application does at runtime.
For instance, if you want to opt-in or opt-out for certain features, you need to configure the environment used at build time to do so.
The aot-generate goal shares a number of properties with the run goal for that reason.