I was reading around a lot about spring dev tools and I have tried them on and they seem pretty cool. However, I don\'t understand how they get enabled / disabled. For instan
No, it's turned off automatically.
From the Spring Boot reference documentation:
Developer tools are automatically disabled when running a fully packaged application. If your application is launched using java -jar or if it’s started using a special classloader, then it is considered a “production application”. Flagging the dependency as optional is a best practice that prevents devtools from being transitively applied to other modules using your project. Gradle does not support optional dependencies out-of-the-box so you may want to have a look to the propdeps-plugin in the meantime.
and
If you want to ensure that devtools is never included in a production build, you can use the excludeDevtools build property to completely remove the JAR. The property is supported with both the Maven and Gradle plugins.