How to enable the Spring Boot ‘Run Dashboard’ in IntelliJ IDEA 2017.2.1

Since JetBrains released IntelliJ IDEA 2017.2.1 – which contains the so called ‘Run Dashboard’ – maintaining (start, stop, debug, etc.) local Spring Boot services in a convenient manner is not exclusively available to STS / Eclipse users anymore. The STS community has been able to leverage the Spring Boot Dashboard for months, and now the IntelliJ IDEA community will also be able to enjoy this feature. Sadly, activating the so-called ‘Run Dashboard’ in IntelliJ IDEA does not seem to be as intuitive as it could be. There are some users claiming that the dashboard does not show up out of the box while starting the application, even if they followed hints like setting -Dide.run.dashboard=true in the configuration.

But the solution is really simple. To activate the dashboard, you have to adjust the run configuration (“Edit Configurations”) and enable “Spring Boot Settings” -> “Show in Run Dashboard”:

Now you can maintain your local applications via the Run Dashboard.