title: Making a spring boot fat jar file with gradle WITHOUT a spring boot gradle plug-in (no access to bootJar)
body: <p>I have a spring-boot application in which I loaded all the necessary (or so I believe) dependencies to run without using spring-boot initializer or the spring-boot gradle plug-in. These tools are not available for me at my work. I can run the application through intellij without issues, but when attempting to run a fat jar, I am met with</p>
  
  <p><code>No auto configuration classes found in META-INF/spring.factories.</code></p>
  
  <p>Now the spring.factory files ARE located inside the fat jar (there are multiples of them) and they are inside the meta-inf directory. </p>
  
  <p>Spring boot has so much automated functionality, I am not sure where to begin. There are a lot of similar posts and everyone just tells people to use the spring-boot gradle plugin bootJar task but as I said these are not available to me. I need to get it running without those tools,
  if anyone has insight into what the issue may be or how to resolve it, any help is appreciated. I will try to add more details later.</p>
  
  <p>I am using spring-boot v. 2.1.1 and spring 5.1.4</p>