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Spring Boot DevTools

In standard Java enterprise development, altering Java source code traditionally requires you to entirely stop the application server, re-compile the entire project, and launch the server again. This completely ruins developer productivity.

Spring Boot provides the spring-boot-devtools dependency to fix this iteration loop smoothly.

Features​

  1. Automatic Restart: Whenever any .java files carefully change inside the classpath, DevTools intercepts the save command and dynamically restarts the Spring context. It separates classes into a base classloader (for unchanging jar dependencies) and a restart classloader (for your custom code). Because it only reloads your custom code, the restart happens almost instantaneously!
  2. LiveReload: DevTools embeds a LiveReload server natively. If you modify a static HTML Thymeleaf template or CSS file, it pushes a signal to your browser to refresh cleanly without restarting the server.
  3. Cache Disabling: Caching is fantastic in production but terrible for development. DevTools automatically disables all template caching natively (e.g., Thymeleaf caching) ensuring you always render the strictly latest HTML state securely.