79.1 Reload static content

There are several options for hot reloading. The recommended approach is to use spring-boot-devtools as it provides additional development-time features such as support for fast application restarts and LiveReload as well as sensible development-time configuration (e.g. template caching).

Alternatively, running in an IDE (especially with debugging on) is a good way to do development (all modern IDEs allow reloading of static resources and usually also hot-swapping of Java class changes).

Finally, the Maven and Gradle plugins can be configured (see the addResources property) to support running from the command line with reloading of static files. You can use that with an external css/js compiler process if you are writing that code with higher level tools.