Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for Spring MVC that works well with most applications.

The auto-configuration adds the following features on top of Spring’s defaults:

If you want to take complete control of Spring MVC, you can add your own @Configuration annotated with @EnableWebMvc. If you want to keep Spring Boot MVC features, and you just want to add additional MVC configuration (interceptors, formatters, view controllers etc.) you can add your own @Bean of type WebMvcConfigurerAdapter, but without @EnableWebMvc.

Spring MVC uses the HttpMessageConverter interface to convert HTTP requests and responses. Sensible defaults are included out of the box, for example Objects can be automatically converted to JSON (using the Jackson library) or XML (using the Jackson XML extension if available, else using JAXB). Strings are encoded using UTF-8 by default.

If you need to add or customize converters you can use Spring Boot’s HttpMessageConverters class:

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.HttpMessageConverters;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.*;
import org.springframework.http.converter.*;

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public HttpMessageConverters customConverters() {
        HttpMessageConverter<?> additional = ...
        HttpMessageConverter<?> another = ...
        return new HttpMessageConverters(additional, another);
    }

}

Any HttpMessageConverter bean that is present in the context will be added to the list of converters. You can also override default converters that way.

Spring MVC has a strategy for generating error codes for rendering error messages from binding errors: MessageCodesResolver. Spring Boot will create one for you if you set the spring.mvc.message-codes-resolver.format property PREFIX_ERROR_CODE or POSTFIX_ERROR_CODE (see the enumeration in DefaultMessageCodesResolver.Format).

By default Spring Boot will serve static content from a directory called /static (or /public or /resources or /META-INF/resources) in the classpath or from the root of the ServletContext. It uses the ResourceHttpRequestHandler from Spring MVC so you can modify that behavior by adding your own WebMvcConfigurerAdapter and overriding the addResourceHandlers method.

In a stand-alone web application the default servlet from the container is also enabled, and acts as a fallback, serving content from the root of the ServletContext if Spring decides not to handle it. Most of the time this will not happen (unless you modify the default MVC configuration) because Spring will always be able to handle requests through the DispatcherServlet.

In addition to the ‘standard’ static resource locations above, a special case is made for Webjars content. Any resources with a path in /webjars/** will be served from jar files if they are packaged in the Webjars format.

	Tip
	Do not use the src/main/webapp directory if your application will be packaged as a jar. Although this directory is a common standard, it will only work with war packaging and it will be silently ignored by most build tools if you generate a jar.

As well as REST web services, you can also use Spring MVC to serve dynamic HTML content. Spring MVC supports a variety of templating technologies including Velocity, FreeMarker and JSPs. Many other templating engines also ship their own Spring MVC integrations.

Spring Boot includes auto-configuration support for the following templating engines:

	Tip
	JSPs should be avoided if possible, there are several known limitations when using them with embedded servlet containers.

When you’re using one of these templating engines with the default configuration, your templates will be picked up automatically from src/main/resources/templates.

Tip

IntelliJ IDEA orders the classpath differently depending on how you run your application. Running your application in the IDE via its main method will result in a different ordering to when you run your application using Maven or Gradle or from its pacakaged jar. This can cause Spring Boot to fail to find the templates on the classpath. If you’re affected by this problem you can reorder the classpath in the IDE to place the module’s classes and resources first. Alternatively, you can configure the template prefix to search every templates directory on the classpath: classpath*:/templates/.

Spring Boot provides an /error mapping by default that handles all errors in a sensible way, and it is registered as a ‘global’ error page in the servlet container. For machine clients it will produce a JSON response with details of the error, the HTTP status and the exception message. For browser clients there is a ‘whitelabel’ error view that renders the same data in HTML format (to customize it just add a View that resolves to ‘error’). To replace the default behaviour completely you can implement ErrorController and register a bean definition of that type, or simply add a bean of type ErrorAttributes to use the existing mechanism but replace the contents.

If you want more specific error pages for some conditions, the embedded servlet containers support a uniform Java DSL for customizing the error handling. For example:

@Bean
public EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer containerCustomizer(){
    return new MyCustomizer();
}

// ...

private static class MyCustomizer implements EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer {

    @Override
    public void customize(ConfigurableEmbeddedServletContainer container) {
        container.addErrorPages(new ErrorPage(HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST, "/400"));
    }

}

You can also use regular Spring MVC features like @ExceptionHandler methods and @ControllerAdvice. The ErrorController will then pick up any unhandled exceptions.

N.B. if you register an ErrorPage with a path that will end up being handled by a Filter (e.g. as is common with some non-Spring web frameworks, like Jersey and Wicket), then the Filter has to be explicitly registered as an ERROR dispatcher, e.g.

@Bean
public FilterRegistrationBean myFilter() {
    FilterRegistrationBean registration = new FilterRegistrationBean();
    registration.setFilter(new MyFilter());
    ...
    registration.setDispatcherTypes(EnumSet.allOf(DispatcherType.class));
    return registration;
}

(the default FilterRegistrationBean does not include the ERROR dispatcher type).

If you’re developing a RESTful API that makes use of hypermedia, Spring Boot provides auto-configuration for Spring HATEOAS that works well with most applications. The auto-configuration replaces the need to use @EnableHypermediaSupport and registers a number of beans to ease building hypermedia-based applications including a LinkDiscoverer and an ObjectMapper configured to correctly marshal responses into the desired representation. The ObjectMapper will be customized based on the spring.jackson.* properties or a Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder bean if one exists.

You can take control of Spring HATEOAS’s configuration by using @EnableHypermediaSupport. Note that this will disable the ObjectMapper customization described above.

When using an embedded servlet container you can register Servlets, Filters and all the listeners from the Servlet spec (e.g. HttpSessionListener) directly as Spring beans. This can be particularly convenient if you want to refer to a value from your application.properties during configuration.

By default, if the context contains only a single Servlet it will be mapped to /. In the case of multiple Servlet beans the bean name will be used as a path prefix. Filters will map to /*.

If convention-based mapping is not flexible enough you can use the ServletRegistrationBean, FilterRegistrationBean and ServletListenerRegistrationBean classes for complete control. You can also register items directly if your bean implements the ServletContextInitializer interface.

Under the hood Spring Boot uses a new type of ApplicationContext for embedded servlet container support. The EmbeddedWebApplicationContext is a special type of WebApplicationContext that bootstraps itself by searching for a single EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. Usually a TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory, JettyEmbeddedServletContainerFactory, or UndertowEmbeddedServletContainerFactory will have been auto-configured.

	Note
	You usually won’t need to be aware of these implementation classes. Most applications will be auto-configured and the appropriate ApplicationContext and EmbeddedServletContainerFactory will be created on your behalf.

Common servlet container settings can be configured using Spring Environment properties. Usually you would define the properties in your application.properties file.

Common server settings include:

See the ServerProperties class for a complete list.

import org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.*;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class CustomizationBean implements EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer {

    @Override
    public void customize(ConfigurableEmbeddedServletContainer container) {
        container.setPort(9000);
    }

}

@Bean
public EmbeddedServletContainerFactory servletContainer() {
    TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory factory = new TomcatEmbeddedServletContainerFactory();
    factory.setPort(9000);
    factory.setSessionTimeout(10, TimeUnit.MINUTES);
    factory.addErrorPages(new ErrorPage(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND, "/notfound.html"));
    return factory;
}

When running a Spring Boot application that uses an embedded servlet container (and is packaged as an executable archive), there are some limitations in the JSP support.

There is a JSP sample so you can see how to set things up.