How to enable hot swapping in Intellij IDEA for a Spring Boot project

How to enable hot swapping in Intellij IDEA for a Spring Boot project

This quick how-to describes how to enable hot swapping in your Spring Boot Project both in Gradle and Maven, since having to constantly manually reload is highly annoying :).

Step 1

If using Gradle, in your build.gradle file add this line in dependencies

dependencies {

	compile 'org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools'
	#other dependencies
}

Otherwise of using Maven, in your pom.xml file add this block to dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
    <optional>true</optional>
</dependency>

Step 2

Then in Intellij goto:

File –> Setting –> Build, Execution, Deployment –> Compiler

check “Build project automatically” like so

Step 3

• Press SHIFT+CTRL+A (Windows/Linux) or Command+CTRL+A (Mac) to open a pop-up window
• Type “registry”
• Make sure the option compiler.automake.allow.when.app.running is checked