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.

If you’re using Jackson to serialize and deserialize JSON data, you might want to write your own JsonSerializer and JsonDeserializer classes. Custom serializers are usually registered with Jackson via a Module, but Spring Boot provides an alternative @JsonComponent annotation which makes it easier to directly register Spring Beans.

You can use @JsonComponent directly on JsonSerializer or JsonDeserializer implementations. You can also use it on classes that contains serializers/deserializers as inner-classes. For example:

import java.io.*;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.*;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.*;
import org.springframework.boot.jackson.*;

@JsonComponent
public class Example {

    public static class Serializer extends JsonSerializer<SomeObject> {
        // ...
    }

    public static class Deserializer extends JsonDeserializer<SomeObject> {
        // ...
    }

}

All @JsonComponent beans in the ApplicationContext will be automatically registered with Jackson, and since @JsonComponent is meta-annotated with @Component, the usual component-scanning rules apply.

Spring Boot also provides JsonObjectSerializer and JsonObjectDeserializer base classes which provide useful alternatives to the standard Jackson versions when serializing Objects. See the Javadoc for details.

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.

You can customize the static resource locations using spring.resources.staticLocations (replacing the default values with a list of directory locations). If you do this the default welcome page detection will switch to your custom locations, so if there is an index.html in any of your locations on startup, it will be the home page of the application.

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.

Spring Boot also supports advanced resource handling features provided by Spring MVC, allowing use cases such as cache busting static resources or using version agnostic URLs for Webjars.

For example, the following configuration will configure a cache busting solution for all static resources, effectively adding a content hash in URLs, such as <link href="/css/spring-2a2d595e6ed9a0b24f027f2b63b134d6.css"/>:

spring.resources.chain.strategy.content.enabled=true
spring.resources.chain.strategy.content.paths=/**

	Note
	Links to resources are rewritten at runtime in template, thanks to a ResourceUrlEncodingFilter, auto-configured for Thymeleaf, Velocity and FreeMarker. You should manually declare this filter when using JSPs. Other template engines aren’t automatically supported right now, but can be with custom template macros/helpers and the use of the ResourceUrlProvider.

When loading resources dynamically with, for example, a JavaScript module loader, renaming files is not an option. That’s why other strategies are also supported and can be combined. A "fixed" strategy will add a static version string in the URL, without changing the file name:

spring.resources.chain.strategy.content.enabled=true
spring.resources.chain.strategy.content.paths=/**
spring.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.enabled=true
spring.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.paths=/js/lib/
spring.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.version=v12

With this configuration, JavaScript modules located under "/js/lib/" will use a fixed versioning strategy "/v12/js/lib/mymodule.js" while other resources will still use the content one <link href="/css/spring-2a2d595e6ed9a0b24f027f2b63b134d6.css"/>.

See ResourceProperties for more of the supported options.

	Tip
	This feature has been thoroughly described in a dedicated blog post and in Spring Framework’s reference documentation.

Spring MVC uses a WebBindingInitializer to initialize a WebDataBinder for a particular request. If you create your own ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer @Bean, Spring Boot will automatically configure Spring MVC to use it.

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 packaged 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.

Tip

The BasicErrorController can be used as a base class for a custom ErrorController. This is particularly useful if you want to add a handler for a new content type (the default is to handle text/html specifically and provide a fallback for everything else). To do that just extend BasicErrorController and add a public method with a @RequestMapping that has a produces attribute, and create a bean of your new type.

You can also define a @ControllerAdvice to customize the JSON document to return for a particular controller and/or exception type.

@ControllerAdvice(basePackageClasses = FooController.class)
public class FooControllerAdvice extends ResponseEntityExceptionHandler {

    @ExceptionHandler(YourException.class)
    @ResponseBody
    ResponseEntity<?> handleControllerException(HttpServletRequest request, Throwable ex) {
        HttpStatus status = getStatus(request);
        return new ResponseEntity<>(new CustomErrorType(status.value(), ex.getMessage()), status);
    }

    private HttpStatus getStatus(HttpServletRequest request) {
        Integer statusCode = (Integer) request.getAttribute("javax.servlet.error.status_code");
        if (statusCode == null) {
            return HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR;
        }
        return HttpStatus.valueOf(statusCode);
    }

}

In the example above, if YourException is thrown by a controller defined in the same package as FooController, a json representation of the CustomerErrorType POJO will be used instead of the ErrorAttributes representation.

If you want more specific error pages for some conditions, the embedded servlet containers support a uniform Java DSL for customizing the error handling. Assuming that you have a mapping for /400:

@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 LinkDiscoverers (for client side support) 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.

Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) is a W3C specification implemented by most browsers that allows you to specify in a flexible way what kind of cross domain requests are authorized, instead of using some less secure and less powerful approaches like IFRAME or JSONP.

As of version 4.2, Spring MVC supports CORS out of the box. Using controller method CORS configuration with @CrossOrigin annotations in your Spring Boot application does not require any specific configuration. Global CORS configuration can be defined by registering a WebMvcConfigurer bean with a customized addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry) method:

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public WebMvcConfigurer corsConfigurer() {
        return new WebMvcConfigurerAdapter() {
            @Override
            public void addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry registry) {
                registry.addMapping("/api/**");
            }
        };
    }
}

When using an embedded servlet container you can register Servlets, Filters and all the listeners from the Servlet spec (e.g. HttpSessionListener) either by using Spring beans or by scanning for Servlet components.

Embedded servlet containers will not directly execute the Servlet 3.0+ javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer interface, or Spring’s org.springframework.web.WebApplicationInitializer interface. This is an intentional design decision intended to reduce the risk that 3rd party libraries designed to run inside a war will break Spring Boot applications.

If you need to perform servlet context initialization in a Spring Boot application, you should register a bean that implements the org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.ServletContextInitializer interface. The single onStartup method provides access to the ServletContext, and can easily be used as an adapter to an existing WebApplicationInitializer if necessary.

Scanning for Servlets, Filters, and listeners

When using an embedded container, automatic registration of @WebServlet, @WebFilter, and @WebListener annotated classes can be enabled using @ServletComponentScan.

	Tip
	@ServletComponentScan will have no effect in a standalone container, where the container’s built-in discovery mechanisms will be used instead.

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:

Spring Boot tries as much as possible to expose common settings but this is not always possible. For those cases, dedicated namespaces offer server-specific customizations (see server.tomcat and server.undertow). For instance, access logs can be configured with specific features of the embedded servlet container.

	Tip
	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.