How to Create, Run, and Monitor SpringBoot Apps in IntelliJ IDEA

This article explains how to create and start a SpringBoot application in IntelliJ IDEA and view its exposed monitoring endpoints.

Creating a SpringBoot Application

Since Spring Cloud applications are also SpringBoot applications, we use an Eureka registration center as an example to demonstrate the correct way to create and run a SpringBoot project in IDEA.

Using IDEA to create a SpringBoot application

Create an Eureka registration center module and initialize a SpringBoot project with Spring Initializer:

Fill in the application information:

Select the required SpringBoot or SpringCloud components:

After creation, the pom.xml already contains the eureka-server dependency:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-server</artifactId>
</dependency>

You can also add other common SpringBoot components provided by IDEA.

Starting the SpringBoot Application

After creating the SpringBoot application, you can run it by executing the main method of the startup class. For managing multiple applications, IDEA’s Run Dashboard is recommended.

Opening Run Dashboard

By default, IDEA detects SpringBoot applications in your project and prompts you to enable the Run Dashboard. If it is not enabled, you can enable it manually.

Starting with default configuration

Right‑click the application in the Run Dashboard and select Run.

Running with a specific configuration

If you need to start the same application with a different configuration file (e.g., application-replica.yml ), you can set it in IDEA instead of building a separate jar.

The eureka‑client has three configurations; we will use application-replica.yml for this run.

Copy the original launch configuration of the eureka‑client.

Set the launch file to application-replica.yml .

Run directly from the Run Dashboard.

Overriding a property in configuration

To change a specific SpringBoot property, such as the server port, you can modify the configuration before running.

Copy the original launch configuration of the eureka‑client and edit the port number.

Viewing Exposed Monitoring Endpoints

You can view all exposed Actuator monitoring endpoints in IDEA’s Run Dashboard; the example shown is the Hystrix Dashboard service.