Spring Boot DevTools provides a set of tools that can be used to improve the development experience when working with Spring Boot applications. These tools can be used to quickly restart your application, live reload static resources, and perform a number of other development-related tasks.
In this article, we'll take a look at how to use Spring Boot DevTools to streamline your development process. We'll also look at some of the other features that DevTools offers.
One of the most useful features of DevTools is the ability to quickly restart your application. This can be done by simply pressing the "R" key while your application is running.
DevTools will automatically detect any changes that have been made to your code and restart the application. This means that you don't have to manually stop and start your application every time you make a change.
Another useful feature of DevTools is live reload. This feature can be used to automatically reload static resources, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, when they are changed.
To use live reload, you first need to add the following dependency to your pom.xml file:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
<optional>true</optional>
</dependency>
Once you've done that, you can enable live reload by adding the following property to your application.properties file:
spring.devtools.livereload.enabled=true
DevTools also offers the ability to remotely debug and develop Spring Boot applications. This can be done by adding the following property to your application.properties file:
spring.devtools.remote.secret=<secret>
Replace <secret> with a secret of your choice. This secret will be used to authenticate incoming requests.
Once you've done that, you can start your application in debug mode using the following command:
$ mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.jvmArguments='-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=n,address=5005'
This will start your application in debug mode and listening on port 5005. You can then connect to your application using a remote debugger, such as Eclipse or Visual Studio Code.
In this article, we've looked at how to use Spring Boot DevTools to streamline your development process. We've also looked at some of the other features that DevTools offers.
If you're looking to improve your development experience, then DevTools is definitely worth checking out.