Starting with Spring Boot 1.5.0, the default devtools values have been changed to exclude devtools from thick jars.
If you want to enable them, you must set the excludeDevtools flag to false.
However, the devtools documentation does not explain how to do this. The necessary documentation is actually in the spring-boot-gradle-plugin documentation.
To do this, you can put this piece of code in the build.gradle file:
bootRepackage { excludeDevtools = false }
Unfortunately, at first this was a mistake and did not affect Spring Boot 1.5.0. The workaround was to do this instead:
springBoot { excludeDevtools = false }
However, I have confirmed that the bootRepackage approach works for Spring Boot 1.5.8.
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