Appendix A. Spring Boot Developer Tools

Spring Boot 1.3 introduced a new set of developer tools that make it even easier to work with Spring Boot at development time. Among its many capabilities are

Automatic restart— Restarts a running application when files are changed in the classpath
LiveReload support— Changes to resources trigger a browser refresh automatically
Remote development— Supports automatic restart and LiveReload when deployed remotely
Development property defaults— Provides sensible development defaults for some configuration properties

Spring Boot’s developer tools come in the form of a library that can be added to a project as a dependency. If you’re using Gradle to build your project, the development tools can be added with the following line in your build.gradle file:

compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools"

Or it can be added as a <dependency> in a Maven POM:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
</dependency>

The developer tools will be disabled when your application is running from a fully packaged JAR or WAR file, so it’s unnecessary to remove this dependency before building a production deployment.

Appendix A. Spring Boot Developer Tools

Automatic restart

LiveReload

Remote development

Development property defaults

Globally configuring developer tools

Unable to load book!