Spring Boot offers a Developer Tool that supports live reloads. This jar is provided by the Spring Boot framework and is useful for development-specific debugging. To use developer tools, add the following dependency to pom.xml file:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
</dependency>If the scope of this dependency is limited to runtime using the tag <scope>runtime</scope> it will not be packaged in the jar.
When the dependency is downloaded, we can execute the project again. From this point on, any change in the code will be picked up by the server without the need to stop and restart the server.
Automatic restart of the application is an important feature of DevTools. Whenever any change is made to the code, DevTools causes an automatic restart when a file on its classpath changes. Spring Boot provides two classloaders: one for the classes that do not change like third-party jars and the other for application code using the RestartClassLoader. When the code is changed, only the RestartClassLoader is loaded, which causes the restart to be much faster.
To save the time wasted in refreshing the browser after every code change, Spring Boot comes with a LiveReload embedded server which triggers an automatic browser refresh. The LiveReload extensions are available for different browsers. Once installed and enabled, any change in the code is detected by the LiveReload server and the browser is automatically refreshed to reflect the change.