Certain resources don’t necessarily need to trigger a restart when they are changed. For example, Thymeleaf templates can just be edited in-place. By default changing resources in /META-INF/maven, /META-INF/resources ,/resources ,/static ,/public or /templates will not trigger a restart but will trigger a live reload. If you want to customize these exclusions you can use the spring.devtools.restart.exclude property. For example, to exclude only /static and /public you would set the following:

spring.devtools.restart.exclude=static/**,public/**

	Tip
	if you want to keep those defaults and add additional exclusions, use the spring.devtools.restart.additional-exclude property instead.

You may want your application to be restarted or reloaded when you make changes to files that are not on the classpath. To do so, use the spring.devtools.restart.additional-paths property to configure additional paths to watch for changes. You can use the spring.devtools.restart.exclude property described above to control whether changes beneath the additional paths will trigger a full restart or just a live reload.

If you don’t want to use the restart feature you can disable it using the spring.devtools.restart.enabled property. In most cases you can set this in your application.properties (this will still initialize the restart classloader but it won’t watch for file changes).

If you need to completely disable restart support, for example, because it doesn’t work with a specific library, you need to set a System property before calling SpringApplication.run(…​). For example:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.setProperty("spring.devtools.restart.enabled", "false");
    SpringApplication.run(MyApp.class, args);
}

If you work with an IDE that continuously compiles changed files, you might prefer to trigger restarts only at specific times. To do this you can use a “trigger file”, which is a special file that must be modified when you want to actually trigger a restart check. Changing the file only triggers the check and the restart will only occur if Devtools has detected it has to do something. The trigger file could be updated manually, or via an IDE plugin.

To use a trigger file use the spring.devtools.restart.trigger-file property.

	Tip
	You might want to set spring.devtools.restart.trigger-file as a global setting so that all your projects behave in the same way.

As described in the Restart vs Reload section above, restart functionality is implemented by using two classloaders. For most applications this approach works well, however, sometimes it can cause classloading issues.

By default, any open project in your IDE will be loaded using the “restart” classloader, and any regular .jar file will be loaded using the “base” classloader. If you work on a multi-module project, and not each module is imported into your IDE, you may need to customize things. To do this you can create a META-INF/spring-devtools.properties file.

The spring-devtools.properties file can contain restart.exclude. and restart.include. prefixed properties. The include elements are items that should be pulled up into the “restart” classloader, and the exclude elements are items that should be pushed down into the “base” classloader. The value of the property is a regex pattern that will be applied to the classpath.

For example:

restart.exclude.companycommonlibs=/mycorp-common-[\\w-]+\.jar
restart.include.projectcommon=/mycorp-myproj-[\\w-]+\.jar

	Note
	All property keys must be unique. As long as a property starts with restart.include. or restart.exclude. it will be considered.

	Tip
	All META-INF/spring-devtools.properties from the classpath will be loaded. You can package files inside your project, or in the libraries that the project consumes.

Restart functionality does not work well with objects that are deserialized using a standard ObjectInputStream. If you need to deserialize data, you may need to use Spring’s ConfigurableObjectInputStream in combination with Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().

Unfortunately, several third-party libraries deserialize without considering the context classloader. If you find such a problem, you will need to request a fix with the original authors.

The remote client application is designed to be run from within your IDE. You need to run org.springframework.boot.devtools.RemoteSpringApplication using the same classpath as the remote project that you’re connecting to. The non-option argument passed to the application should be the remote URL that you are connecting to.

For example, if you are using Eclipse or STS, and you have a project named my-app that you’ve deployed to Cloud Foundry, you would do the following:

A running remote client will look like this:

  .   ____          _                                              __ _ _
 /\\ / ___'_ __ _ _(_)_ __  __ _          ___               _      \ \ \ \
( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` |        | _ \___ _ __  ___| |_ ___ \ \ \ \
 \\/  ___)| |_)| | | | | || (_| []::::::[]   / -_) '  \/ _ \  _/ -_) ) ) ) )
  '  |____| .__|_| |_|_| |_\__, |        |_|_\___|_|_|_\___/\__\___|/ / / /
 =========|_|==============|___/===================================/_/_/_/
 :: Spring Boot Remote :: 1.4.6.RELEASE

2015-06-10 18:25:06.632  INFO 14938 --- [           main] o.s.b.devtools.RemoteSpringApplication   : Starting RemoteSpringApplication on pwmbp with PID 14938 (/Users/pwebb/projects/spring-boot/code/spring-boot-devtools/target/classes started by pwebb in /Users/pwebb/projects/spring-boot/code/spring-boot-samples/spring-boot-sample-devtools)
2015-06-10 18:25:06.671  INFO 14938 --- [           main] s.c.a.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext : Refreshing org.springframework.context.annotation.AnnotationConfigApplicationContext@2a17b7b6: startup date [Wed Jun 10 18:25:06 PDT 2015]; root of context hierarchy
2015-06-10 18:25:07.043  WARN 14938 --- [           main] o.s.b.d.r.c.RemoteClientConfiguration    : The connection to http://localhost:8080 is insecure. You should use a URL starting with 'https://'.
2015-06-10 18:25:07.074  INFO 14938 --- [           main] o.s.b.d.a.OptionalLiveReloadServer       : LiveReload server is running on port 35729
2015-06-10 18:25:07.130  INFO 14938 --- [           main] o.s.b.devtools.RemoteSpringApplication   : Started RemoteSpringApplication in 0.74 seconds (JVM running for 1.105)

	Note
	Because the remote client is using the same classpath as the real application it can directly read application properties. This is how the spring.devtools.remote.secret property is read and passed to the server for authentication.

	Tip
	It’s always advisable to use https:// as the connection protocol so that traffic is encrypted and passwords cannot be intercepted.

	Tip
	If you need to use a proxy to access the remote application, configure the spring.devtools.remote.proxy.host and spring.devtools.remote.proxy.port properties.

The remote client will monitor your application classpath for changes in the same way as the local restart. Any updated resource will be pushed to the remote application and (if required) trigger a restart. This can be quite helpful if you are iterating on a feature that uses a cloud service that you don’t have locally. Generally remote updates and restarts are much quicker than a full rebuild and deploy cycle.

	Note
	Files are only monitored when the remote client is running. If you change a file before starting the remote client, it won’t be pushed to the remote server.

Java remote debugging is useful when diagnosing issues on a remote application. Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to enable remote debugging when your application is deployed outside of your data center. Remote debugging can also be tricky to setup if you are using a container based technology such as Docker.

To help work around these limitations, devtools supports tunneling of remote debug traffic over HTTP. The remote client provides a local server on port 8000 that you can attach a remote debugger to. Once a connection is established, debug traffic is sent over HTTP to the remote application. You can use the spring.devtools.remote.debug.local-port property if you want to use a different port.

You’ll need to ensure that your remote application is started with remote debugging enabled. Often this can be achieved by configuring JAVA_OPTS. For example, with Cloud Foundry you can add the following to your manifest.yml:

---
  env:
    JAVA_OPTS: "-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:server=y,transport=dt_socket,suspend=n"

	Tip
	Notice that you don’t need to pass an address=NNNN option to -Xrunjdwp. If omitted Java will simply pick a random free port.

	Note
	Debugging a remote service over the Internet can be slow and you might need to increase timeouts in your IDE. For example, in Eclipse you can select Java → Debug from Preferences…​ and change the Debugger timeout (ms) to a more suitable value (60000 works well in most situations).

Warning

When using the remote debug tunnel with IntelliJ IDEA, all breakpoints must be configured to suspend the thread rather than the VM. By default, breakpoints in IntelliJ IDEA suspend the entire VM rather than only suspending the thread that hit the breakpoint. This has the unwanted side-effect of suspending the thread that manages the remote debug tunnel, causing your debugging session to freeze. When using the remote debug tunnel with IntelliJ IDEA, all breakpoints should be configured to suspend the thread rather than the VM. Please set IDEA-165769 for further details.