Say Hello to Developer Tools
Get introduced to the features provided by Spring Developer Tools.
The Spring Boot team introduced a new module several versions back called Developer Tools, or simply DevTools.
Features of DevTools
This lesson provides multiple features of DevTools:
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Automatic restart and reload of our application
-
Property defaults
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Logging changes in autoconfiguration
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Exclusion of static resources
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LiveReload support
Adding DevTools to the project
In order to add DevTools to our project, we need to apply the following changes to our pom.xml
file:
<dependency><groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId><artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId><scope>runtime</scope><optional>true</optional></dependency>
In Maven, we set it as an optional
dependency, so it doesn’t end up in our production code. This is also recommended so that spring-boot-devtools
isn’t transitively applied to other code beyond our own.
The spring-boot-devtools
module looks at how our application is launched. If it spies things running through java -jar
or from a special classloader (such as a cloud provider), then the module will deem it a production application and not use DevTools’ features. Running with Maven’s spring-boot:run
signals it to run in development mode with all features enabled.
Automatic restarts and reloads
The Spring Boot team has also added the ability to detect changes in user code and restart our application.
Restart vs. ...
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