To use Spring Loaded with the Maven command line, just add it as a dependency in the Spring Boot plugin declaration, e.g.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>springloaded</artifactId>
            <version>1.2.0.RELEASE</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

This normally works pretty well with Eclipse and IntelliJ as long as they have their build configuration aligned with the Maven defaults (Eclipse m2e does this out of the box).

You need to jump through a few hoops if you want to use Spring Loaded in combination with Gradle and IntelliJ. By default, IntelliJ will compile classes into a different location than Gradle, causing Spring Loaded monitoring to fail.

To configure IntelliJ correctly you can use the idea Gradle plugin:

buildscript {
    repositories { jcenter() }
    dependencies {
        classpath "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:1.2.7.RELEASE"
        classpath 'org.springframework:springloaded:1.2.0.RELEASE'
    }
}

apply plugin: 'idea'

idea {
    module {
        inheritOutputDirs = false
        outputDir = file("$buildDir/classes/main/")
    }
}

// ...

	Note
	IntelliJ must be configured to use the same Java version as the command line Gradle task and springloaded must be included as a buildscript dependency.

You can also additionally enable ‘Make Project Automatically’ inside Intellij to automatically compile your code whenever a file is saved.