Integrate Live Hover by using Spring Boot Tools

For more information about this feature, see the Live application information hovers section of the Spring Boot Tools Marketplace page.

Prerequisites

To integrate Live Hover by using Spring Boot Tools you need:

A Tanzu Spring Boot application, such as tanzu-java-web-app
Spring Boot Extension Pack (includes Spring Boot Dashboard) extension

Activate the Live Hover feature

Activate the Live Hover feature by enabling it in Code > Preferences > Settings > Extensions > Tanzu Developer Tools.

Deploy a Workload to the Cluster

Follow these steps to deploy the workload for an app to a cluster, making live hovers appear. The examples in some steps reference the sample tanzu-java-web-app.

Clone the repository by running:
```
git clone REPOSITORY-ADDRESS
```
Where REPOSITORY-ADDRESS is your repository address. For example, https://github.com/vmware-tanzu/application-accelerator-samples.
Open the project in VS Code, with the Live Hover feature enabled, by running:
```
TAP_LIVE_HOVER=true code ./PROJECT-DIRECTORY
```
Where PROJECT-DIRECTORY is your project directory. For example, ./application-accelerator-samples/tanzu-java-web-app.
Verify that you are targeting the cluster on which you want to run the workload by running:
```
kubectl cluster-info
```
For example:
```
$ kubectl cluster-info
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://...
CoreDNS is running at https://...

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.
```
Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code periodically connects to your cluster to search for pods from which live data can be extracted and shown. Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code uses your current context from ~/.kube/config to choose which cluster to connect with.
If you don’t have the workload running yet, run Tanzu: Apply Workload from the Command Palette. Tanzu Developer Tools for VS Code periodically searches for pods in your cluster that correspond to the workload configurations it finds in your workspace.

The workload takes time to build and then start a running pod. To see if a pod has started running, run:

kubectl get pods

For example:

$ kubectl get pods
NAME                                                   READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
tanzu-java-web-app-00001-deployment-8596bfd9b4-5vgx2   2/2     Running     0          20s
tanzu-java-web-app-build-1-build-pod                   0/1     Completed   0          2m26s
tanzu-java-web-app-config-writer-fpnzb-pod             0/1     Completed   0          67s

In this example, live data can be extracted from the ...-0001-deployment-... pod.

Open a Java file, such as HelloController.java. After a delay of up to 30 seconds, because of a 30-second polling loop, green highlights appear in your code.
Hover over any of the bubbles to see live information about the corresponding element.
The Live Beans and Live Endpoint Mapping information are displayed in Spring Boot Dashboard. To view the Spring Boot Dashboard, run View: Show Spring Boot Dashboard from the Command Palette.