Automatically reload Thymeleaf templates in Spring Boot app

Question

In my Spring Boot (2.4.2) app, I have some Thymeleaf templates in the src/main/resources/templates directory. I have spring-boot-devtools installed which automatically reloads classes when the code changes.

I would like the Thymeleaf templates to also be automatically reloaded when they are changed. I've tried adding the following to the local application configuration

spring:
  thymeleaf:
    cache: false

But it doesn't seem to work, ie the templates are loaded only on startup, so I need to restart the serve after changing them. How can I enable automatic reloading of the Thymeleaf templates?

Update

In response to some of the comments: I run the app from IntelliJ IDEA.

Answer 1

If you're using IntelliJ, you have to rebuild the project (fn + shift + 9) on mac and (ctrl + shift + f9) on windows I believe. This can be kind of annoying, there might be some built in functionality in IntelliJ, or your IDEA of choice, to just rebuild when certain files are modified.

Answer 2

Something like this should work. Instead of reading your templates from the built files (typically, in your /target folder), you can tell Thymeleaf to read them directly from your /resources folder. That way, you only need to hit F5 to refresh your browser.

# Setup auto-reload of templates for Thymeleaf by disabling the Template Cache.
# This allows you to live-code on HTML without needing to restart the server.
spring:
  thymeleaf: # Thymeleaf
    cache: false
    mode: HTML
    encoding: UTF-8
    # change load path to resource folder instead of /target
    prefix: file:src/main/resources/templates/

  resources: # Static resources
    # change load path to resource folder instead of /target
    static-locations: file:src/main/resources/static/
    cache:
      period: 0