The Developer Tools documentation indicates that you can specify additional paths outside of the classpath that will be watched for changes here. This does indeed work.
spring.devtools.restart.additional-paths
However, the documentation then seems to suggest that by specifying an exclude / additional-exclude pattern you can make this additional path trigger only a livereload and not a restart. This does not work.
spring.devtools.restart.exclude
spring.devtools.restart.additional-exclude