The latest Liberty biuldpack update now adds the ability to switch to JRE 1.8 runtime. Given I am now switching to JDK 1.8 for all my projects this has come in very handy, and of course Spring Boot favors JDK 1.8 as well. The default is still JRE 1.7 so to switch to 1.8 set an ENV variable as follows in your manifest.yml as shown below.
manifest.yml
applications:
- name: pas-myapp
memory: 512M
instances: 1
host: pas-myapp
domain: mybluemix.net
path: ./target/myapp-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar
env:
JBP_CONFIG_IBMJDK: "version: 1.8.+"
More Information
https://developer.ibm.com/bluemix/2015/05/05/liberty-buildpack-updates-java-8-java-ee-7-updates/
