Development mode
Ktor provides a special mode targeted for development. This mode enables the following capabilities:
Auto-reload for reloading application classes without restarting the server.
Extended information for debugging pipelines (with stack traces).
Extended debugging information on a response page in a case of a 5** server error.
Enable development mode
You can enable development mode in different ways: in the application configuration file, using a dedicated system property, or environment variable.
Configuration file
To enable development mode in a configuration file, set the development
option to true
:
The 'io.ktor.development' system property
The io.ktor.development system property allows you to enable development mode when running your application:
To run an application in development mode using IntelliJ IDEA, pass
io.ktor.development
with the-D
flag to VM options:-Dio.ktor.development=trueIf you run your application using a Gradle task, you can pass
io.ktor.development
to theapplicationDefaultJvmArgs
property in a build.gradle(.kts) file:application { applicationDefaultJvmArgs = listOf("-Dio.ktor.development=true") }application { applicationDefaultJvmArgs = ["-Dio.ktor.development=true"] }
The 'io.ktor.development' environment variable
To enable development mode for a Native client, use the io.ktor.development
environment variable.