Top 10 Mind-Blowing Spring Boot Tricks for Beginners

Ramesh Fadatare

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3 min read

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Mar 19, 2025

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Spring Boot is powerful, flexible, and developer-friendly — but did you know it has hidden tricks that can make your development experience even better? 🎯 Here are 10+ mind-blowing Spring Boot tricks that will boost your productivity and take your applications to the next level! ⚡

1. Enable DevTools for Auto Restart 🔄

Tired of manually restarting your app after every code change?

🔥 Trick:

Add this to pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
    <optional>true</optional>
</dependency>

🤯 Why?

• Automatically restarts the app when a file is changed!
• No need to stop and restart manually.

2. Override Default Properties Without Changing application.properties 🔧

Need to quickly change a property without modifying the config file?

🔥 Trick:

java -jar myapp.jar --server.port=9090

or

mvn spring-boot:run -Dspring-boot.run.arguments="--server.port=9090"

🤯 Why?

• Temporary override without modifying files.
• Useful for testing different configurations quickly.

3. Use the Spring Boot Banner for Custom Messages 🎨

Make your Spring Boot startup screen more awesome!

🔥 Trick:

Create a banner.txt file in src/main/resources/ and add:

███████╗██████╗ ██╗███████╗███╗   ██╗
██╔════╝██╔══██╗██║██╔════╝████╗  ██║
███████╗██████╔╝██║███████╗██╔██╗ ██║
╚════██║██╔═══╝ ██║╚════██║██║╚██╗██║
███████║██║     ██║███████║██║ ╚████║
╚══════╝╚═╝     ╚═╝╚══════╝╚═╝  ╚═══╝

or use ASCII generators like this.

🤯 Why?

• Makes your Spring Boot startup unique and fun!
• Great for branding your app.

4. Actuator Magic: Get All Mappings in One Call 🔍