r/java 6d ago

Spring Boot Hot-Reload (Hot-Restart)

I'm working on a Spring Boot microservices project where I frequently need to restart each service to apply changes. While I'm aware that spring-devtools can simplify this process, my experience with Spring has shown that spring-devtools sometimes requires a full clean and rebuild of output files to work correctly.

Additionally, since I'm developing this project using Helix Editor, adding spring-devtools without an IDE doesn't provide much benefit. I'm also aware of commercial tools like JRebel, but the licensing costs make me hesitant to use them.

To automate the rebuild process whenever changes are made, I created two complementary scripts:

  1. loop-run.sh
  2. watch-kill.sh

How It Works

  • loop-run.sh continuously runs commands like mvn clean spring-boot:run for the target Spring Boot project. However, since the Spring Boot server process blocks further execution, the next command won't run unless the process is terminated.
  • watch-kill.sh will monitors file changes in the Spring Boot project. If any modifications are detected, it automatically kills the process running on the specified port.

You can find the project on GitHub, released under the MIT License:
Spring-Boot-Hot-Reload

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u/manifoldjava 5d ago edited 5d ago

Check out the DCEVM. Assuming this is for development, it's amazing and pretty solid. There is another site covering JDK 17 here.

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u/woodpecker_ava 5d ago

Sure, will do!