No, it’s turned off automatically.
From the Spring Boot reference documentation:
Developer tools are automatically disabled when running a fully
packaged application. If your application is launched using java -jar
or if it’s started using a special classloader, then it is considered
a “production application”. Flagging the dependency as optional is a
best practice that prevents devtools from being transitively applied
to other modules using your project. Gradle does not support optional
dependencies out-of-the-box so you may want to have a look to the
propdeps-plugin in the meantime.
and
If you want to ensure that devtools is never included in a production
build, you can use the excludeDevtools build property to completely
remove the JAR. The property is supported with both the Maven and
Gradle plugins.