IntelliJ IDEA 2018.2 auto-detection for Spring Boot and the ‘Run Dashboard’

In an earlier post we explained how to enable the Spring Boot Run Dashboard in IntelliJ IDEA 2017.2. The workaround at that time was not really easy, and due to the ever-increasing popularity of Spring Boot, the community certainly expected IDEA to make it easier to handle the dashboard with future releases. Now some time has passed and in the last few weeks we got more and more feedback about our existing blog post. People claimed that our proposed workaround no longer works.

So it seems that something has changed.

The good part is, IDEA has added automatic detection for Spring Boot applications. For example, if you create a new application or import an existing application, IntelliJ will use a notification prompting you to add the Spring Boot configuration to the Run Dashboard.

Unfortunately, if you miss (or reject) this pop-up, there is no Run Dashboard at all and you have to activate it yourself. And that’s still not comfortable.

The new approach:

IDEA has changed the way to enable the Run Dashboard and it is no longer necessary to customize the boot VM options. To enable the dashboard for version 2018.2 you have to modify the execution configuration templates and add ‘Spring Boot’ to the available Run Dashboard configurations.

After that, each Spring Boot application (each module in your project) will be displayed in the Run Dashboard. It therefore only has to be executed once per project.

Although the automatic detection feature is really helpful, the manual activation is still neither transparent nor intuitive, and hopefully it will improve in some way.