IntelliJ IDEA: Breakpoint not being hit, and is shown without the tick, just a red dot

I have a gradle project, and when I put a breakpoint it is displayed as a red dot, with a tick inside, and it just works fine.

working breakpoint

The problem is that in some classes (in the same project, not a dependency class), the red dot doesn't have a tick inside, and it doesn't tell why it wouldn't work. And it just doesn't work..:

enter image description here

What have I tried so far:

  • Gradle clean & build
  • Rebuild project
  • Restart debug
  • Invalidate caches and restart IntelliJ
  • Update IntelliJ to the latest version (2017.2.5)
  • Mute & Unmute breakpoints

This question is similar, but clearly not the same: Intellij IDEA: Breakpoint not being hit, and is shown greyed out


Did some searching through IntelliJ Help PDF:
Help Doc pg. 431

Their documentation Describes the checkmark as "Shown at run-time when the breakpoint is recognized by the debugger as set on an executable code line."

and the regular red dot as "Shown at design-time or during the debugging session when the class with such breakpoint is not yet loaded. "

So it would seem that the line you're adding the breaking point to never gets executed. You can try stepping up line by line through the class to make sure the class is not getting hung up somewhere.

Hope this helps


I get this same issue intermittently from time to time, I always run the latest version of IDEA. The break points are shown as red but without a tick inside them. Even after I rebuild or re-run in debug they do not get a tick, and they do not "work", i.e., the code continues. I resolve by restarting IDEA, then restarting the debugger/debug run config.


The same happened with me on Mac machine. I followed these steps and all worked fine:

  1. Stop server.
  2. Close all intellij projects.
  3. Open only the specific intellij project on which my application needs to run.
  4. Start the server in debug mode.