IntelliJ + Tomcat + Spring-Loaded

Question

I would like to try out Spring Source's "Spring Loaded" class reloading agent, with Tomcat run via IntelliJ.

https://github.com/SpringSource/spring-loaded

I've added the JVM arguments to my Tomcat run configuration, and my webapp starts up without errors and seems to behave normally.

I'm not really sure how to trigger the class reloading though. Do I just need to compile the classes that I modify? I've tried that and that didn't seem to work. Do I need to update Tomcat and deploy classes and resources? That doesn't seem to work either...?

Any specific configuration details would be greatly appreciated.

EDIT: More info, I think my problem may have to do with using two modules, one a core code library, and one the webapp. I use Maven for both, one configured as a jar project and the other as a war project. IntelliJ sets up the Artifact for the exploded war to use the jar module's jar file. I've tried switching the Artifact config to incorporate the jar module's compiled output into WEB-INF/classes instead. Now I see the .class files in target/webapp/WEB-INF/class/etc. But I'm not sure how to get IntelliJ to update a specific class file when I edit it.

Answer 1

If you added the following jvm parameters (as described at the springloaded page) to your tomcat

-javaagent:<pathTo>/springloaded-{VERSION}.jar -noverify SomeJavaClass

you should be fine. It may help to disable auto reloading in tomcat for the webapp you are testing. For exmaple in your server.xml:

<Host appBase="webapps" autoDeploy="true" name="localhost" unpackWARs="true">
    <Context docBase="projekt" path="/projekt" reloadable="false" ...

This ensures that only the springloaded classloader loads changed classes.