How do I enable Thymeleaf Live Reloading in Spring Boot 1.3

Question

I've created a Spring Boot Gradle project that uses Thymeleaf. My IDE is IntelliJ. I've created an application.properties in the root folder with:

spring.resources.cache-period=0
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false
spring.thymeleaf.mode=LEGACYHTML5

But somehow it's still not auto-reloading. I have to hit the "Make Project" button first. I have another project, with the same configuration (not sure about the IntelliJ settings) that strangely enough, does work on refresh.

My application.properties is being read as I can pull a custom property out using the @Value annotation.

For reference, my build.gradle

buildscript {
    ext {
        springBootVersion = '1.3.1.RELEASE'
    }
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
        jcenter()
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-gradle-plugin:${springBootVersion}")
        classpath("org.springframework:springloaded:1.2.5.RELEASE")
    }
}

apply plugin: 'spring-boot'
apply plugin: 'java'
apply plugin: 'idea'

sourceCompatibility = 1.8
targetCompatibility = 1.8

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

jar {
    baseName = 'earthalive'
    version = ""
}

repositories {
    mavenCentral()
}


dependencies {
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-web')
    compile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf')
    testCompile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test')
    compile('net.sourceforge.nekohtml:nekohtml:1.9.22')
}

task wrapper(type: Wrapper) {
    gradleVersion = '2.9'
}

Ideas?

Answer 1

According to the Spring Boot 1.3 release documentation:

The Spring Boot Gradle plugin no longer adds src/main/resources directly to the classpath when using bootRun. If you want live, in-place editing we recommend using Devtools. The addResources property can be set in your gradle build if you want to restore Spring Boot 1.2. behaviour.

Thymeleaf relies on src/main/resources being added to the classpath regardless if you're using spring-boot-devtools or not. Fortunately, spring-boot-devtools does have an option to turn this on again to restore boot 1.2 behaviour.

Add to your build.gradle:

https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/build-tool-plugins-gradle-plugin.html

bootRun {
    addResources = true
}

Personal Opinion: It looks to me like Spring-loaded will eventually be deprecated in favour of spring-boot-devtools. Dynamic hotswapping seems to be a complex affair in Spring, and I think the Spring team has decided to rather work on a fast reload basis as is used by devtools.