Development Environment

Plugin Reloading



If you make changes to a plugin, you will generally need to shut down the server, update the plugin, and start the server again. The following hints can help you eliminate the restart in the certain cases:

• if you do not change code affecting plugin initialization and change only body of the methods, you can attach to the server process with a debugger and hot-swap the code.

• only for plugins Plugins Packaging: if you make a change in some resource (jsp, js, images) you can copy the resources to webapps/ROOT/plugins/<plugin-name> directory to allow Tomcat to reload them.

  tip

  You can speed up Tomcat reloading logic by setting JspServlet development mode to true in the tomcat/conf/web.xml file.

• only for plugins Plugins Packaging: change in build agent part of plugin will initiate build agents upgrade.

To enable TeamCity development mode, pass the "teamcity.development.mode=true" TeamCity Startup Properties. Using the option you will:

• Enforce application server to quicker recompile changed .jsp classes

• Disable JS and CSS resources merging/caching

Also, to check minor changes in the code without server restart, you can start the server with debug, connect debugging session to the application and use Java hotswap to reload the changed classes from your IDE. Note that the standard hotswap does not allow you to change method signatures.