Spring Boot comes with a number of great features to help developers with their applications. DevTools is one of those features. It can help with debugging, reloading, and more.
DevTools is a set of tools that can help with development. It can do things like reload your application without restarting the server, and automatically restart the server when files are changed. It can also help with debugging, by allowing you to debug your application in your IDE.
To use DevTools, you will need to add it to your project. You can do this by adding it to your dependencies. For example, in Maven, you would add it to your pom.xml
:
<dependencies>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
</dependency>
</dependencies>
Or, if you are using Gradle, you would add it to your build.gradle
:
dependencies {
compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools'
}
Once you have DevTools configured in your project, you can start using it.
One of the most useful features of DevTools is the ability to reload your application without restarting the server. To do this, you can simply hit Ctrl+F9
(or Cmd+F9
on macOS) in your IDE. This will trigger a full restart of your application.
If you only want to restart the server, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+F9
(or Cmd+Shift+F9
on macOS). This will only restart the server, and not the application.
Another useful feature of DevTools is the ability to debug your application in your IDE. To do this, you need to start your application in debug mode. You can do this by passing the --debug
flag to the spring-boot
CLI:
$ spring-boot --debug
Or, you can set the spring.boot.debug
property in your application.properties
:
spring.boot.debug=true
Once your application is running in debug mode, you can attach a debugger to it. For example, in IntelliJ IDEA, you can do this by going to Run > Attach Debugger to Local Process
.
DevTools is a great tool that can help with development. It can do things like reload your application without restarting the server, and automatically restart the server when files are changed. It can also help with debugging, by allowing you to debug your application in your IDE.