REPL with the remote shell

Tip submitted by @cbornet

As the Spring Boot remote shell will be removed in Spring Boot 2.0, this tip is deprecated

Since v3.8, JHipster has a shell Maven/Gradle profile that will include the Spring Boot remote shell. If your project was generated with JHipster < 3.8, you’ll need to add the spring-boot-starter-remote-shell dependency manually.

This brings some useful commands that can help debugging a live application and you can also write your own.

Another nice feature which is not documented in Spring Boot docs is that you can execute Groovy script code on a live app in a REPL way. For this:

• Start your app

• Open an ssh session in a terminal (here for user admin, password: admin):

ssh -p2000 admin@localhost

• Once connected, switch to Groovy REPL mode:

> repl groovy

• Get the BeanFactory:

> bf = context.attributes['spring.beanfactory']

• Now you can use the BeanFactory to get Spring beans and call their methods:

> bf.getBean('userRepository').findAll().login
[system, anonymoususer, admin, user]
> bf.getBean('userService').getUserWithAuthoritiesByLogin('user').get().authorities.name
[ROLE_USER]