Spring Boot is well suited for web application development. You can create a self-contained HTTP server by using embedded Tomcat, Jetty, Undertow, or Netty. Most web applications use the spring-boot-starter-web module to get up and running quickly. You can also choose to build reactive web applications by using the spring-boot-starter-webflux module.

If you have not yet developed a Spring Boot web application, you can follow the "Hello World!" example in the Getting started section.

1. Servlet Web Applications

If you want to build servlet-based web applications, you can take advantage of Spring Boot’s auto-configuration for Spring MVC.

1.1. The “Spring Web MVC Framework”

The Spring Web MVC framework (often referred to as “Spring MVC”) is a rich “model view controller” web framework. Spring MVC lets you create special @Controller or @RestController beans to handle incoming HTTP requests. Methods in your controller are mapped to HTTP by using @RequestMapping annotations.

The following code shows a typical @RestController that serves JSON data:

import java.util.List;

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.DeleteMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.PathVariable;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/users")
public class MyRestController {

    private final UserRepository userRepository;

    private final CustomerRepository customerRepository;

    public MyRestController(UserRepository userRepository, CustomerRepository customerRepository) {
        this.userRepository = userRepository;
        this.customerRepository = customerRepository;
    }

    @GetMapping("/{user}")
    public User getUser(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        return this.userRepository.findById(userId).get();
    }

    @GetMapping("/{user}/customers")
    public List<Customer> getUserCustomers(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        return this.userRepository.findById(userId).map(this.customerRepository::findByUser).get();
    }

    @DeleteMapping("/{user}")
    public void deleteUser(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        this.userRepository.deleteById(userId);
    }

}

Spring MVC is part of the core Spring Framework, and detailed information is available in the reference documentation. There are also several guides that cover Spring MVC available at spring.io/guides.

1.1.1. Spring MVC Auto-configuration

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:

  • Inclusion of ContentNegotiatingViewResolver and BeanNameViewResolver beans.

  • Support for serving static resources, including support for WebJars (covered later in this document).

  • Automatic registration of Converter, GenericConverter, and Formatter beans.

  • Support for HttpMessageConverters (covered later in this document).

  • Automatic registration of MessageCodesResolver (covered later in this document).

  • Static index.html support.

  • Automatic use of a ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer bean (covered later in this document).

If you want to keep those Spring Boot MVC customizations and make more MVC customizations (interceptors, formatters, view controllers, and other features), you can add your own @Configuration class of type WebMvcConfigurer but without @EnableWebMvc.

If you want to provide custom instances of RequestMappingHandlerMapping, RequestMappingHandlerAdapter, or ExceptionHandlerExceptionResolver, and still keep the Spring Boot MVC customizations, you can declare a bean of type WebMvcRegistrations and use it to provide custom instances of those components.

If you want to take complete control of Spring MVC, you can add your own @Configuration annotated with @EnableWebMvc, or alternatively add your own @Configuration-annotated DelegatingWebMvcConfiguration as described in the Javadoc of @EnableWebMvc.

Spring MVC uses a different ConversionService to the one used to convert values from your application.properties or application.yaml file. It means that Period, Duration and DataSize converters are not available and that @DurationUnit and @DataSizeUnit annotations will be ignored.

If you want to customize the ConversionService used by Spring MVC, you can provide a WebMvcConfigurer bean with an addFormatters method. From this method you can register any converter that you like, or you can delegate to the static methods available on ApplicationConversionService.

1.1.2. HttpMessageConverters

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 (by using the Jackson library) or XML (by using the Jackson XML extension, if available, or by using JAXB if the Jackson XML extension is not available). By default, strings are encoded in UTF-8.

If you need to add or customize converters, you can use Spring Boot’s HttpMessageConverters class, as shown in the following listing:

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.http.HttpMessageConverters;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.converter.HttpMessageConverter;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyHttpMessageConvertersConfiguration {

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

}

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

1.1.3. Custom JSON Serializers and Deserializers

If you use 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 through a module, but Spring Boot provides an alternative @JsonComponent annotation that makes it easier to directly register Spring Beans.

You can use the @JsonComponent annotation directly on JsonSerializer, JsonDeserializer or KeyDeserializer implementations. You can also use it on classes that contain serializers/deserializers as inner classes, as shown in the following example:

import java.io.IOException;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonParser;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.ObjectCodec;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonDeserializer;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonSerializer;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializerProvider;

import org.springframework.boot.jackson.JsonComponent;

@JsonComponent
public class MyJsonComponent {

    public static class Serializer extends JsonSerializer<MyObject> {

        @Override
        public void serialize(MyObject value, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider serializers) throws IOException {
            jgen.writeStringField("name", value.getName());
            jgen.writeNumberField("age", value.getAge());
        }

    }

    public static class Deserializer extends JsonDeserializer<MyObject> {

        @Override
        public MyObject deserialize(JsonParser jsonParser, DeserializationContext ctxt)
                throws IOException, JsonProcessingException {
            ObjectCodec codec = jsonParser.getCodec();
            JsonNode tree = codec.readTree(jsonParser);
            String name = tree.get("name").textValue();
            int age = tree.get("age").intValue();
            return new MyObject(name, age);
        }

    }

}

All @JsonComponent beans in the ApplicationContext are automatically registered with Jackson. Because @JsonComponent is meta-annotated with @Component, the usual component-scanning rules apply.

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

The example above can be rewritten to use JsonObjectSerializer/JsonObjectDeserializer as follows:

import java.io.IOException;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonGenerator;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonParser;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.ObjectCodec;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.DeserializationContext;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.JsonNode;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.SerializerProvider;

import org.springframework.boot.jackson.JsonComponent;
import org.springframework.boot.jackson.JsonObjectDeserializer;
import org.springframework.boot.jackson.JsonObjectSerializer;

@JsonComponent
public class MyJsonComponent {

    public static class Serializer extends JsonObjectSerializer<MyObject> {

        @Override
        protected void serializeObject(MyObject value, JsonGenerator jgen, SerializerProvider provider)
                throws IOException {
            jgen.writeStringField("name", value.getName());
            jgen.writeNumberField("age", value.getAge());
        }

    }

    public static class Deserializer extends JsonObjectDeserializer<MyObject> {

        @Override
        protected MyObject deserializeObject(JsonParser jsonParser, DeserializationContext context, ObjectCodec codec,
                JsonNode tree) throws IOException {
            String name = nullSafeValue(tree.get("name"), String.class);
            int age = nullSafeValue(tree.get("age"), Integer.class);
            return new MyObject(name, age);
        }

    }

}

1.1.4. MessageCodesResolver

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

1.1.5. Static Content

By default, Spring Boot serves 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 that you can modify that behavior by adding your own WebMvcConfigurer 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 does not happen (unless you modify the default MVC configuration), because Spring can always handle requests through the DispatcherServlet.

By default, resources are mapped on /**, but you can tune that with the spring.mvc.static-path-pattern property. For instance, relocating all resources to /resources/** can be achieved as follows:

Properties
spring.mvc.static-path-pattern=/resources/**
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    static-path-pattern: "/resources/**"

You can also customize the static resource locations by using the spring.web.resources.static-locations property (replacing the default values with a list of directory locations). The root servlet context path, "/", is automatically added as a location as well.

In addition to the “standard” static resource locations mentioned earlier, a special case is made for Webjars content. Any resources with a path in /webjars/** are served from jar files if they are packaged in the Webjars format.

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

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

To use version agnostic URLs for Webjars, add the webjars-locator-core dependency. Then declare your Webjar. Using jQuery as an example, adding "/webjars/jquery/jquery.min.js" results in "/webjars/jquery/x.y.z/jquery.min.js" where x.y.z is the Webjar version.

If you use JBoss, you need to declare the webjars-locator-jboss-vfs dependency instead of the webjars-locator-core. Otherwise, all Webjars resolve as a 404.

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

Properties
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.content.enabled=true
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.content.paths=/**
Yaml
spring:
  web:
    resources:
      chain:
        strategy:
          content:
            enabled: true
            paths: "/**"
Links to resources are rewritten in templates at runtime, thanks to a ResourceUrlEncodingFilter that is auto-configured for Thymeleaf and FreeMarker. You should manually declare this filter when using JSPs. Other template engines are currently not automatically supported 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 is why other strategies are also supported and can be combined. A "fixed" strategy adds a static version string in the URL without changing the file name, as shown in the following example:

Properties
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.content.enabled=true
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.content.paths=/**
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.enabled=true
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.paths=/js/lib/
spring.web.resources.chain.strategy.fixed.version=v12
Yaml
spring:
  web:
    resources:
      chain:
        strategy:
          content:
            enabled: true
            paths: "/**"
          fixed:
            enabled: true
            paths: "/js/lib/"
            version: "v12"

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

See WebProperties.Resources for more supported options.

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

1.1.6. Welcome Page

Spring Boot supports both static and templated welcome pages. It first looks for an index.html file in the configured static content locations. If one is not found, it then looks for an index template. If either is found, it is automatically used as the welcome page of the application.

1.1.7. Path Matching and Content Negotiation

Spring MVC can map incoming HTTP requests to handlers by looking at the request path and matching it to the mappings defined in your application (for example, @GetMapping annotations on Controller methods).

Spring Boot chooses to disable suffix pattern matching by default, which means that requests like "GET /projects/spring-boot.json" will not be matched to @GetMapping("/projects/spring-boot") mappings. This is considered as a best practice for Spring MVC applications. This feature was mainly useful in the past for HTTP clients which did not send proper "Accept" request headers; we needed to make sure to send the correct Content Type to the client. Nowadays, Content Negotiation is much more reliable.

There are other ways to deal with HTTP clients that do not consistently send proper "Accept" request headers. Instead of using suffix matching, we can use a query parameter to ensure that requests like "GET /projects/spring-boot?format=json" will be mapped to @GetMapping("/projects/spring-boot"):

Properties
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.favor-parameter=true
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    contentnegotiation:
      favor-parameter: true

Or if you prefer to use a different parameter name:

Properties
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.favor-parameter=true
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.parameter-name=myparam
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    contentnegotiation:
      favor-parameter: true
      parameter-name: "myparam"

Most standard media types are supported out-of-the-box, but you can also define new ones:

Properties
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.media-types.markdown=text/markdown
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    contentnegotiation:
      media-types:
        markdown: "text/markdown"

Suffix pattern matching is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. If you understand the caveats and would still like your application to use suffix pattern matching, the following configuration is required:

Properties
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.favor-path-extension=true
spring.mvc.pathmatch.use-suffix-pattern=true
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    contentnegotiation:
      favor-path-extension: true
    pathmatch:
      use-suffix-pattern: true

Alternatively, rather than open all suffix patterns, it is more secure to only support registered suffix patterns:

Properties
spring.mvc.contentnegotiation.favor-path-extension=true
spring.mvc.pathmatch.use-registered-suffix-pattern=true
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    contentnegotiation:
      favor-path-extension: true
    pathmatch:
      use-registered-suffix-pattern: true

As of Spring Framework 5.3, Spring MVC supports several implementation strategies for matching request paths to Controller handlers. It was previously only supporting the AntPathMatcher strategy, but it now also offers PathPatternParser. Spring Boot now provides a configuration property to choose and opt in the new strategy:

Properties
spring.mvc.pathmatch.matching-strategy=path-pattern-parser
Yaml
spring:
  mvc:
    pathmatch:
      matching-strategy: "path-pattern-parser"

For more details on why you should consider this new implementation, see the dedicated blog post.

PathPatternParser is an optimized implementation but restricts usage of some path patterns variants and is incompatible with suffix pattern matching (spring.mvc.pathmatch.use-suffix-pattern, spring.mvc.pathmatch.use-registered-suffix-pattern) or mapping the DispatcherServlet with a servlet prefix (spring.mvc.servlet.path).

1.1.8. ConfigurableWebBindingInitializer

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

1.1.9. Template Engines

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 Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, and JSPs. Also, many other templating engines include their own Spring MVC integrations.

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

If possible, JSPs should be avoided. There are several known limitations when using them with embedded servlet containers.

When you use one of these templating engines with the default configuration, your templates are picked up automatically from src/main/resources/templates.

Depending on how you run your application, your IDE may order the classpath differently. Running your application in the IDE from its main method results in a different ordering than when you run your application by using Maven or Gradle or from its packaged jar. This can cause Spring Boot to fail to find the expected template. If you have this problem, you can reorder the classpath in the IDE to place the module’s classes and resources first.

1.1.10. Error Handling

By default, Spring Boot provides an /error mapping 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 produces 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, add a View that resolves to error).

There are a number of server.error properties that can be set if you want to customize the default error handling behavior. See the “Server Properties” section of the Appendix.

To replace the default behavior completely, you can implement ErrorController and register a bean definition of that type or add a bean of type ErrorAttributes to use the existing mechanism but replace the contents.

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 so, extend BasicErrorController, 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 class annotated with @ControllerAdvice to customize the JSON document to return for a particular controller and/or exception type, as shown in the following example:

import jakarta.servlet.RequestDispatcher;
import jakarta.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;

import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.http.ResponseEntity;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ControllerAdvice;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ResponseBody;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.method.annotation.ResponseEntityExceptionHandler;

@ControllerAdvice(basePackageClasses = SomeController.class)
public class MyControllerAdvice extends ResponseEntityExceptionHandler {

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

    private HttpStatus getStatus(HttpServletRequest request) {
        Integer code = (Integer) request.getAttribute(RequestDispatcher.ERROR_STATUS_CODE);
        HttpStatus status = HttpStatus.resolve(code);
        return (status != null) ? status : HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR;
    }

}

In the preceding example, if YourException is thrown by a controller defined in the same package as SomeController, a JSON representation of the CustomErrorType POJO is used instead of the ErrorAttributes representation.

In some cases, errors handled at the controller level are not recorded by the metrics infrastructure. Applications can ensure that such exceptions are recorded with the request metrics by setting the handled exception as a request attribute:

import jakarta.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;

import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.error.ErrorAttributes;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler;

@Controller
public class MyController {

    @ExceptionHandler(CustomException.class)
    String handleCustomException(HttpServletRequest request, CustomException ex) {
        request.setAttribute(ErrorAttributes.ERROR_ATTRIBUTE, ex);
        return "errorView";
    }

}
Custom Error Pages

If you want to display a custom HTML error page for a given status code, you can add a file to an /error directory. Error pages can either be static HTML (that is, added under any of the static resource directories) or be built by using templates. The name of the file should be the exact status code or a series mask.

For example, to map 404 to a static HTML file, your directory structure would be as follows:

src/
 +- main/
     +- java/
     |   + <source code>
     +- resources/
         +- public/
             +- error/
             |   +- 404.html
             +- <other public assets>

To map all 5xx errors by using a FreeMarker template, your directory structure would be as follows:

src/
 +- main/
     +- java/
     |   + <source code>
     +- resources/
         +- templates/
             +- error/
             |   +- 5xx.ftlh
             +- <other templates>

For more complex mappings, you can also add beans that implement the ErrorViewResolver interface, as shown in the following example:

import java.util.Map;

import jakarta.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.servlet.error.ErrorViewResolver;
import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;

public class MyErrorViewResolver implements ErrorViewResolver {

    @Override
    public ModelAndView resolveErrorView(HttpServletRequest request, HttpStatus status, Map<String, Object> model) {
        // Use the request or status to optionally return a ModelAndView
        if (status == HttpStatus.INSUFFICIENT_STORAGE) {
            // We could add custom model values here
            new ModelAndView("myview");
        }
        return null;
    }

}

You can also use regular Spring MVC features such as @ExceptionHandler methods and @ControllerAdvice. The ErrorController then picks up any unhandled exceptions.

Mapping Error Pages outside of Spring MVC

For applications that do not use Spring MVC, you can use the ErrorPageRegistrar interface to directly register ErrorPages. This abstraction works directly with the underlying embedded servlet container and works even if you do not have a Spring MVC DispatcherServlet.

import org.springframework.boot.web.server.ErrorPage;
import org.springframework.boot.web.server.ErrorPageRegistrar;
import org.springframework.boot.web.server.ErrorPageRegistry;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyErrorPagesConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public ErrorPageRegistrar errorPageRegistrar() {
        return this::registerErrorPages;
    }

    private void registerErrorPages(ErrorPageRegistry registry) {
        registry.addErrorPages(new ErrorPage(HttpStatus.BAD_REQUEST, "/400"));
    }

}
If you register an ErrorPage with a path that ends up being handled by a Filter (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, as shown in the following example: 
import java.util.EnumSet;

import jakarta.servlet.DispatcherType;

import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.FilterRegistrationBean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyFilterConfiguration {

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

}

Note that the default FilterRegistrationBean does not include the ERROR dispatcher type.

Error handling in a war deployment

When deployed to a servlet container, Spring Boot uses its error page filter to forward a request with an error status to the appropriate error page. This is necessary as the servlet specification does not provide an API for registering error pages. Depending on the container that you are deploying your war file to and the technologies that your application uses, some additional configuration may be required.

The error page filter can only forward the request to the correct error page if the response has not already been committed. By default, WebSphere Application Server 8.0 and later commits the response upon successful completion of a servlet’s service method. You should disable this behavior by setting com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.invokeFlushAfterService to false.

If you are using Spring Security and want to access the principal in an error page, you must configure Spring Security’s filter to be invoked on error dispatches. To do so, set the spring.security.filter.dispatcher-types property to async, error, forward, request.

1.1.11. CORS Support

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

As of version 4.2, Spring MVC supports CORS. 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, as shown in the following example:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.CorsRegistry;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurer;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyCorsConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public WebMvcConfigurer corsConfigurer() {
        return new WebMvcConfigurer() {

            @Override
            public void addCorsMappings(CorsRegistry registry) {
                registry.addMapping("/api/**");
            }

        };
    }

}

1.2. Embedded Servlet Container Support

For servlet application, Spring Boot includes support for embedded Tomcat, Jetty, and Undertow servers. Most developers use the appropriate “Starter” to obtain a fully configured instance. By default, the embedded server listens for HTTP requests on port 8080.

1.2.1. Servlets, Filters, and listeners

When using an embedded servlet container, you can register servlets, filters, and all the listeners (such as HttpSessionListener) from the servlet spec, either by using Spring beans or by scanning for servlet components.

Registering Servlets, Filters, and Listeners as Spring Beans

Any Servlet, Filter, or servlet *Listener instance that is a Spring bean is registered with the embedded container. 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 is mapped to /. In the case of multiple servlet beans, the bean name is used as a path prefix. Filters map to /*.

If convention-based mapping is not flexible enough, you can use the ServletRegistrationBean, FilterRegistrationBean, and ServletListenerRegistrationBean classes for complete control.

It is usually safe to leave filter beans unordered. If a specific order is required, you should annotate the Filter with @Order or make it implement Ordered. You cannot configure the order of a Filter by annotating its bean method with @Order. If you cannot change the Filter class to add @Order or implement Ordered, you must define a FilterRegistrationBean for the Filter and set the registration bean’s order using the setOrder(int) method. Avoid configuring a filter that reads the request body at Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE, since it might go against the character encoding configuration of your application. If a servlet filter wraps the request, it should be configured with an order that is less than or equal to OrderedFilter.REQUEST_WRAPPER_FILTER_MAX_ORDER.

To see the order of every Filter in your application, enable debug level logging for the web logging group (logging.level.web=debug). Details of the registered filters, including their order and URL patterns, will then be logged at startup.
Take care when registering Filter beans since they are initialized very early in the application lifecycle. If you need to register a Filter that interacts with other beans, consider using a DelegatingFilterProxyRegistrationBean instead.

1.2.2. Servlet Context Initialization

Embedded servlet containers do not directly execute the jakarta.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer interface or Spring’s org.springframework.web.WebApplicationInitializer interface. This is an intentional design decision intended to reduce the risk that third party libraries designed to run inside a war may 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.web.servlet.ServletContextInitializer interface. The single onStartup method provides access to the ServletContext and, if necessary, can easily be used as an adapter to an existing WebApplicationInitializer.

Scanning for Servlets, Filters, and listeners

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

@ServletComponentScan has no effect in a standalone container, where the container’s built-in discovery mechanisms are used instead.

1.2.3. The ServletWebServerApplicationContext

Under the hood, Spring Boot uses a different type of ApplicationContext for embedded servlet container support. The ServletWebServerApplicationContext is a special type of WebApplicationContext that bootstraps itself by searching for a single ServletWebServerFactory bean. Usually a TomcatServletWebServerFactory, JettyServletWebServerFactory, or UndertowServletWebServerFactory has been auto-configured.

You usually do not need to be aware of these implementation classes. Most applications are auto-configured, and the appropriate ApplicationContext and ServletWebServerFactory are created on your behalf.

1.2.4. Customizing Embedded Servlet Containers

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

Common server settings include:

  • Network settings: Listen port for incoming HTTP requests (server.port), interface address to bind to server.address, and so on.

  • Session settings: Whether the session is persistent (server.servlet.session.persistent), session timeout (server.servlet.session.timeout), location of session data (server.servlet.session.store-dir), and session-cookie configuration (server.servlet.session.cookie.*).

  • Error management: Location of the error page (server.error.path) and so on.

  • SSL

  • HTTP compression

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.

See the ServerProperties class for a complete list.
SameSite Cookies

The SameSite cookie attribute can be used by web browsers to control if and how cookies are submitted in cross-site requests. The attribute is particularly relevant for modern web browsers which have started to change the default value that is used when the attribute is missing.

If you want to change the SameSite attribute of your session cookie, you can use the server.servlet.session.cookie.same-site property. This property is supported by auto-configured Tomcat, Jetty and Undertow servers. It is also used to configure Spring Session servlet based SessionRepository beans.

For example, if you want your session cookie to have a SameSite attribute of None, you can add the following to your application.properties or application.yaml file:

Properties
server.servlet.session.cookie.same-site=none
Yaml
server:
  servlet:
    session:
      cookie:
        same-site: "none"

If you want to change the SameSite attribute on other cookies added to your HttpServletResponse, you can use a CookieSameSiteSupplier. The CookieSameSiteSupplier is passed a Cookie and may return a SameSite value, or null.

There are a number of convenience factory and filter methods that you can use to quickly match specific cookies. For example, adding the following bean will automatically apply a SameSite of Lax for all cookies with a name that matches the regular expression myapp.*.

import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.server.CookieSameSiteSupplier;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MySameSiteConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public CookieSameSiteSupplier applicationCookieSameSiteSupplier() {
        return CookieSameSiteSupplier.ofLax().whenHasNameMatching("myapp.*");
    }

}
Programmatic Customization

If you need to programmatically configure your embedded servlet container, you can register a Spring bean that implements the WebServerFactoryCustomizer interface. WebServerFactoryCustomizer provides access to the ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory, which includes numerous customization setter methods. The following example shows programmatically setting the port:

import org.springframework.boot.web.server.WebServerFactoryCustomizer;
import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.server.ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class MyWebServerFactoryCustomizer implements WebServerFactoryCustomizer<ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory> {

    @Override
    public void customize(ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory server) {
        server.setPort(9000);
    }

}

TomcatServletWebServerFactory, JettyServletWebServerFactory and UndertowServletWebServerFactory are dedicated variants of ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory that have additional customization setter methods for Tomcat, Jetty and Undertow respectively. The following example shows how to customize TomcatServletWebServerFactory that provides access to Tomcat-specific configuration options:

import java.time.Duration;

import org.springframework.boot.web.embedded.tomcat.TomcatServletWebServerFactory;
import org.springframework.boot.web.server.WebServerFactoryCustomizer;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;

@Component
public class MyTomcatWebServerFactoryCustomizer implements WebServerFactoryCustomizer<TomcatServletWebServerFactory> {

    @Override
    public void customize(TomcatServletWebServerFactory server) {
        server.addConnectorCustomizers((connector) -> connector.setAsyncTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(20).toMillis()));
    }

}
Customizing ConfigurableServletWebServerFactory Directly

For more advanced use cases that require you to extend from ServletWebServerFactory, you can expose a bean of such type yourself.

Setters are provided for many configuration options. Several protected method “hooks” are also provided should you need to do something more exotic. See the source code documentation for details.

Auto-configured customizers are still applied on your custom factory, so use that option carefully.

1.2.5. JSP Limitations

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.

  • With Jetty and Tomcat, it should work if you use war packaging. An executable war will work when launched with java -jar, and will also be deployable to any standard container. JSPs are not supported when using an executable jar.

  • Undertow does not support JSPs.

  • Creating a custom error.jsp page does not override the default view for error handling. Custom error pages should be used instead.

2. Reactive Web Applications

Spring Boot simplifies development of reactive web applications by providing auto-configuration for Spring Webflux.

2.1. The “Spring WebFlux Framework”

Spring WebFlux is the new reactive web framework introduced in Spring Framework 5.0. Unlike Spring MVC, it does not require the servlet API, is fully asynchronous and non-blocking, and implements the Reactive Streams specification through the Reactor project.

Spring WebFlux comes in two flavors: functional and annotation-based. The annotation-based one is quite close to the Spring MVC model, as shown in the following example:

import reactor.core.publisher.Flux;
import reactor.core.publisher.Mono;

import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.DeleteMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.PathVariable;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/users")
public class MyRestController {

    private final UserRepository userRepository;

    private final CustomerRepository customerRepository;

    public MyRestController(UserRepository userRepository, CustomerRepository customerRepository) {
        this.userRepository = userRepository;
        this.customerRepository = customerRepository;
    }

    @GetMapping("/{user}")
    public Mono<User> getUser(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        return this.userRepository.findById(userId);
    }

    @GetMapping("/{user}/customers")
    public Flux<Customer> getUserCustomers(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        return this.userRepository.findById(userId).flatMapMany(this.customerRepository::findByUser);
    }

    @DeleteMapping("/{user}")
    public void deleteUser(@PathVariable Long userId) {
        this.userRepository.deleteById(userId);
    }

}

“WebFlux.fn”, the functional variant, separates the routing configuration from the actual handling of the requests, as shown in the following example:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicate;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunction;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse;

import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.DELETE;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.GET;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.accept;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunctions.route;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyRoutingConfiguration {

    private static final RequestPredicate ACCEPT_JSON = accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);

    @Bean
    public RouterFunction<ServerResponse> monoRouterFunction(MyUserHandler userHandler) {
        return route(
                GET("/{user}").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::getUser).andRoute(
                GET("/{user}/customers").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::getUserCustomers).andRoute(
                DELETE("/{user}").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::deleteUser);
    }

}

import reactor.core.publisher.Mono;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerRequest;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse;

@Component
public class MyUserHandler {

    public Mono<ServerResponse> getUser(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

    public Mono<ServerResponse> getUserCustomers(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

    public Mono<ServerResponse> deleteUser(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

}

WebFlux is part of the Spring Framework and detailed information is available in its reference documentation.

You can define as many RouterFunction beans as you like to modularize the definition of the router. Beans can be ordered if you need to apply a precedence.

To get started, add the spring-boot-starter-webflux module to your application.

Adding both spring-boot-starter-web and spring-boot-starter-webflux modules in your application results in Spring Boot auto-configuring Spring MVC, not WebFlux. This behavior has been chosen because many Spring developers add spring-boot-starter-webflux to their Spring MVC application to use the reactive WebClient. You can still enforce your choice by setting the chosen application type to SpringApplication.setWebApplicationType(WebApplicationType.REACTIVE).

“WebFlux.fn”, the functional variant, separates the routing configuration from the actual handling of the requests, as shown in the following example:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicate;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunction;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse;

import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.DELETE;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.GET;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RequestPredicates.accept;
import static org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunctions.route;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyRoutingConfiguration {

    private static final RequestPredicate ACCEPT_JSON = accept(MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON);

    @Bean
    public RouterFunction<ServerResponse> monoRouterFunction(MyUserHandler userHandler) {
        return route(
                GET("/{user}").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::getUser).andRoute(
                GET("/{user}/customers").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::getUserCustomers).andRoute(
                DELETE("/{user}").and(ACCEPT_JSON), userHandler::deleteUser);
    }

}

import reactor.core.publisher.Mono;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerRequest;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse;

@Component
public class MyUserHandler {

    public Mono<ServerResponse> getUser(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

    public Mono<ServerResponse> getUserCustomers(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

    public Mono<ServerResponse> deleteUser(ServerRequest request) {
        ...
    }

}

WebFlux is part of the Spring Framework and detailed information is available in its reference documentation.

You can define as many RouterFunction beans as you like to modularize the definition of the router. Beans can be ordered if you need to apply a precedence.

To get started, add the spring-boot-starter-webflux module to your application.

Adding both spring-boot-starter-web and spring-boot-starter-webflux modules in your application results in Spring Boot auto-configuring Spring MVC, not WebFlux. This behavior has been chosen because many Spring developers add spring-boot-starter-webflux to their Spring MVC application to use the reactive WebClient. You can still enforce your choice by setting the chosen application type to SpringApplication.setWebApplicationType(WebApplicationType.REACTIVE).

2.1.1. Spring WebFlux Auto-configuration

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

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

If you want to keep Spring Boot WebFlux features and you want to add additional WebFlux configuration, you can add your own @Configuration class of type WebFluxConfigurer but without @EnableWebFlux.

If you want to take complete control of Spring WebFlux, you can add your own @Configuration annotated with @EnableWebFlux.

2.1.2. HTTP Codecs with HttpMessageReaders and HttpMessageWriters

Spring WebFlux uses the HttpMessageReader and HttpMessageWriter interfaces to convert HTTP requests and responses. They are configured with CodecConfigurer to have sensible defaults by looking at the libraries available in your classpath.

Spring Boot provides dedicated configuration properties for codecs, spring.codec.*. It also applies further customization by using CodecCustomizer instances. For example, spring.jackson.* configuration keys are applied to the Jackson codec.

If you need to add or customize codecs, you can create a custom CodecCustomizer component, as shown in the following example:

import org.springframework.boot.web.codec.CodecCustomizer;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.codec.ServerSentEventHttpMessageReader;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyCodecsConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public CodecCustomizer myCodecCustomizer() {
        return (configurer) -> {
            configurer.registerDefaults(false);
            configurer.customCodecs().register(new ServerSentEventHttpMessageReader());
            // ...
        };
    }

}

You can also leverage Boot’s custom JSON serializers and deserializers.

2.1.3. Static Content

By default, Spring Boot serves static content from a directory called /static (or /public or /resources or /META-INF/resources) in the classpath. It uses the ResourceWebHandler from Spring WebFlux so that you can modify that behavior by adding your own WebFluxConfigurer and overriding the addResourceHandlers method.

By default, resources are mapped on /**, but you can tune that by setting the spring.webflux.static-path-pattern property. For instance, relocating all resources to /resources/** can be achieved as follows:

Properties
spring.webflux.static-path-pattern=/resources/**
Yaml
spring:
  webflux:
    static-path-pattern: "/resources/**"

You can also customize the static resource locations by using spring.web.resources.static-locations. Doing so replaces the default values with a list of directory locations. If you do so, the default welcome page detection switches to your custom locations. So, if there is an index.html in any of your locations on startup, it is the home page of the application.

In addition to the “standard” static resource locations listed earlier, a special case is made for Webjars content. Any resources with a path in /webjars/** are served from jar files if they are packaged in the Webjars format.

Spring WebFlux applications do not strictly depend on the servlet API, so they cannot be deployed as war files and do not use the src/main/webapp directory.

2.1.4. Welcome Page

Spring Boot supports both static and templated welcome pages. It first looks for an index.html file in the configured static content locations. If one is not found, it then looks for an index template. If either is found, it is automatically used as the welcome page of the application.

2.1.5. Template Engines

As well as REST web services, you can also use Spring WebFlux to serve dynamic HTML content. Spring WebFlux supports a variety of templating technologies, including Thymeleaf, FreeMarker, and Mustache.

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

When you use one of these templating engines with the default configuration, your templates are picked up automatically from src/main/resources/templates.

2.1.6. Error Handling

Spring Boot provides a WebExceptionHandler that handles all errors in a sensible way. Its position in the processing order is immediately before the handlers provided by WebFlux, which are considered last. For machine clients, it produces a JSON response with details of the error, the HTTP status, and the exception message. For browser clients, there is a “whitelabel” error handler that renders the same data in HTML format. You can also provide your own HTML templates to display errors (see the next section).

The first step to customizing this feature often involves using the existing mechanism but replacing or augmenting the error contents. For that, you can add a bean of type ErrorAttributes.

To change the error handling behavior, you can implement ErrorWebExceptionHandler and register a bean definition of that type. Because a ErrorWebExceptionHandler is quite low-level, Spring Boot also provides a convenient AbstractErrorWebExceptionHandler to let you handle errors in a WebFlux functional way, as shown in the following example:

import reactor.core.publisher.Mono;

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.WebProperties.Resources;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.reactive.error.AbstractErrorWebExceptionHandler;
import org.springframework.boot.web.reactive.error.ErrorAttributes;
import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.http.HttpStatus;
import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Component;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunction;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.RouterFunctions;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerRequest;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.function.server.ServerResponse.BodyBuilder;

@Component
public class MyErrorWebExceptionHandler extends AbstractErrorWebExceptionHandler {

    public MyErrorWebExceptionHandler(ErrorAttributes errorAttributes, Resources resources,
            ApplicationContext applicationContext) {
        super(errorAttributes, resources, applicationContext);
    }

    @Override
    protected RouterFunction<ServerResponse> getRoutingFunction(ErrorAttributes errorAttributes) {
        return RouterFunctions.route(this::acceptsXml, this::handleErrorAsXml);
    }

    private boolean acceptsXml(ServerRequest request) {
        return request.headers().accept().contains(MediaType.APPLICATION_XML);
    }

    public Mono<ServerResponse> handleErrorAsXml(ServerRequest request) {
        BodyBuilder builder = ServerResponse.status(HttpStatus.INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR);
        // ... additional builder calls
        return builder.build();
    }

}

For a more complete picture, you can also subclass DefaultErrorWebExceptionHandler directly and override specific methods.

In some cases, errors handled at the controller or handler function level are not recorded by the metrics infrastructure. Applications can ensure that such exceptions are recorded with the request metrics by setting the handled exception as a request attribute:

import org.springframework.boot.web.reactive.error.ErrorAttributes;
import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.ExceptionHandler;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.reactive.result.view.Rendering;
import org.springframework.web.server.ServerWebExchange;

@Controller
public class MyExceptionHandlingController {

    @GetMapping("/profile")
    public Rendering userProfile() {
        // ...
        throw new IllegalStateException();
    }

    @ExceptionHandler(IllegalStateException.class)
    public Rendering handleIllegalState(ServerWebExchange exchange, IllegalStateException exc) {
        exchange.getAttributes().putIfAbsent(ErrorAttributes.ERROR_ATTRIBUTE, exc);
        return Rendering.view("errorView").modelAttribute("message", exc.getMessage()).build();
    }

}
Custom Error Pages

If you want to display a custom HTML error page for a given status code, you can add a file to an /error directory. Error pages can either be static HTML (that is, added under any of the static resource directories) or built with templates. The name of the file should be the exact status code or a series mask.

For example, to map 404 to a static HTML file, your directory structure would be as follows:

src/
 +- main/
     +- java/
     |   + <source code>
     +- resources/
         +- public/
             +- error/
             |   +- 404.html
             +- <other public assets>

To map all 5xx errors by using a Mustache template, your directory structure would be as follows:

src/
 +- main/
     +- java/
     |   + <source code>
     +- resources/
         +- templates/
             +- error/
             |   +- 5xx.mustache
             +- <other templates>

2.1.7. Web Filters

Spring WebFlux provides a WebFilter interface that can be implemented to filter HTTP request-response exchanges. WebFilter beans found in the application context will be automatically used to filter each exchange.

Where the order of the filters is important they can implement Ordered or be annotated with @Order. Spring Boot auto-configuration may configure web filters for you. When it does so, the orders shown in the following table will be used:

Web Filter Order

MetricsWebFilter

Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE + 1

WebFilterChainProxy (Spring Security)

-100

HttpTraceWebFilter

Ordered.LOWEST_PRECEDENCE - 10

2.2. Embedded Reactive Server Support

Spring Boot includes support for the following embedded reactive web servers: Reactor Netty, Tomcat, Jetty, and Undertow. Most developers use the appropriate “Starter” to obtain a fully configured instance. By default, the embedded server listens for HTTP requests on port 8080.

2.3. Reactive Server Resources Configuration

When auto-configuring a Reactor Netty or Jetty server, Spring Boot will create specific beans that will provide HTTP resources to the server instance: ReactorResourceFactory or JettyResourceFactory.

By default, those resources will be also shared with the Reactor Netty and Jetty clients for optimal performances, given:

  • the same technology is used for server and client

  • the client instance is built using the WebClient.Builder bean auto-configured by Spring Boot

Developers can override the resource configuration for Jetty and Reactor Netty by providing a custom ReactorResourceFactory or JettyResourceFactory bean - this will be applied to both clients and servers.

You can learn more about the resource configuration on the client side in the WebClient Runtime section.

3. Graceful Shutdown

Graceful shutdown is supported with all four embedded web servers (Jetty, Reactor Netty, Tomcat, and Undertow) and with both reactive and servlet-based web applications. It occurs as part of closing the application context and is performed in the earliest phase of stopping SmartLifecycle beans. This stop processing uses a timeout which provides a grace period during which existing requests will be allowed to complete but no new requests will be permitted. The exact way in which new requests are not permitted varies depending on the web server that is being used. Jetty, Reactor Netty, and Tomcat will stop accepting requests at the network layer. Undertow will accept requests but respond immediately with a service unavailable (503) response.

Graceful shutdown with Tomcat requires Tomcat 9.0.33 or later.

To enable graceful shutdown, configure the server.shutdown property, as shown in the following example:

Properties
server.shutdown=graceful
Yaml
server:
  shutdown: "graceful"

To configure the timeout period, configure the spring.lifecycle.timeout-per-shutdown-phase property, as shown in the following example:

Properties
spring.lifecycle.timeout-per-shutdown-phase=20s
Yaml
spring:
  lifecycle:
    timeout-per-shutdown-phase: "20s"
Using graceful shutdown with your IDE may not work properly if it does not send a proper SIGTERM signal. See the documentation of your IDE for more details.

4. Spring Security

If Spring Security is on the classpath, then web applications are secured by default. Spring Boot relies on Spring Security’s content-negotiation strategy to determine whether to use httpBasic or formLogin. To add method-level security to a web application, you can also add @EnableGlobalMethodSecurity with your desired settings. Additional information can be found in the Spring Security Reference Guide.

The default UserDetailsService has a single user. The user name is user, and the password is random and is printed at INFO level when the application starts, as shown in the following example:

Using generated security password: 78fa095d-3f4c-48b1-ad50-e24c31d5cf35
If you fine-tune your logging configuration, ensure that the org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.security category is set to log INFO-level messages. Otherwise, the default password is not printed.

You can change the username and password by providing a spring.security.user.name and spring.security.user.password.

The basic features you get by default in a web application are:

  • A UserDetailsService (or ReactiveUserDetailsService in case of a WebFlux application) bean with in-memory store and a single user with a generated password (see SecurityProperties.User for the properties of the user).

  • Form-based login or HTTP Basic security (depending on the Accept header in the request) for the entire application (including actuator endpoints if actuator is on the classpath).

  • A DefaultAuthenticationEventPublisher for publishing authentication events.

You can provide a different AuthenticationEventPublisher by adding a bean for it.

4.1. MVC Security

The default security configuration is implemented in SecurityAutoConfiguration and UserDetailsServiceAutoConfiguration. SecurityAutoConfiguration imports SpringBootWebSecurityConfiguration for web security and UserDetailsServiceAutoConfiguration configures authentication, which is also relevant in non-web applications. To switch off the default web application security configuration completely or to combine multiple Spring Security components such as OAuth2 Client and Resource Server, add a bean of type SecurityFilterChain (doing so does not disable the UserDetailsService configuration or Actuator’s security).

To also switch off the UserDetailsService configuration, you can add a bean of type UserDetailsService, AuthenticationProvider, or AuthenticationManager.

Access rules can be overridden by adding a custom SecurityFilterChain or WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter bean. Spring Boot provides convenience methods that can be used to override access rules for actuator endpoints and static resources. EndpointRequest can be used to create a RequestMatcher that is based on the management.endpoints.web.base-path property. PathRequest can be used to create a RequestMatcher for resources in commonly used locations.

4.2. WebFlux Security

Similar to Spring MVC applications, you can secure your WebFlux applications by adding the spring-boot-starter-security dependency. The default security configuration is implemented in ReactiveSecurityAutoConfiguration and UserDetailsServiceAutoConfiguration. ReactiveSecurityAutoConfiguration imports WebFluxSecurityConfiguration for web security and UserDetailsServiceAutoConfiguration configures authentication, which is also relevant in non-web applications. To switch off the default web application security configuration completely, you can add a bean of type WebFilterChainProxy (doing so does not disable the UserDetailsService configuration or Actuator’s security).

To also switch off the UserDetailsService configuration, you can add a bean of type ReactiveUserDetailsService or ReactiveAuthenticationManager.

Access rules and the use of multiple Spring Security components such as OAuth 2 Client and Resource Server can be configured by adding a custom SecurityWebFilterChain bean. Spring Boot provides convenience methods that can be used to override access rules for actuator endpoints and static resources. EndpointRequest can be used to create a ServerWebExchangeMatcher that is based on the management.endpoints.web.base-path property.

PathRequest can be used to create a ServerWebExchangeMatcher for resources in commonly used locations.

For example, you can customize your security configuration by adding something like:

import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.security.reactive.PathRequest;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.web.server.ServerHttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.web.server.SecurityWebFilterChain;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyWebFluxSecurityConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public SecurityWebFilterChain springSecurityFilterChain(ServerHttpSecurity http) {
        http.authorizeExchange((spec) -> {
            spec.matchers(PathRequest.toStaticResources().atCommonLocations()).permitAll();
            spec.pathMatchers("/foo", "/bar").authenticated();
        });
        http.formLogin();
        return http.build();
    }

}

4.3. OAuth2

OAuth2 is a widely used authorization framework that is supported by Spring.

4.3.1. Client

If you have spring-security-oauth2-client on your classpath, you can take advantage of some auto-configuration to set up an OAuth2/Open ID Connect clients. This configuration makes use of the properties under OAuth2ClientProperties. The same properties are applicable to both servlet and reactive applications.

You can register multiple OAuth2 clients and providers under the spring.security.oauth2.client prefix, as shown in the following example:

Properties
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.client-id=abcd
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.client-secret=password
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.client-name=Client for user scope
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.provider=my-oauth-provider
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.scope=user
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.redirect-uri=https://my-redirect-uri.com
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.client-authentication-method=basic
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-1.authorization-grant-type=authorization-code

spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.client-id=abcd
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.client-secret=password
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.client-name=Client for email scope
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.provider=my-oauth-provider
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.scope=email
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.redirect-uri=https://my-redirect-uri.com
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.client-authentication-method=basic
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client-2.authorization-grant-type=authorization_code

spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.authorization-uri=https://my-auth-server/oauth/authorize
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.token-uri=https://my-auth-server/oauth/token
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.user-info-uri=https://my-auth-server/userinfo
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.user-info-authentication-method=header
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.jwk-set-uri=https://my-auth-server/token_keys
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.my-oauth-provider.user-name-attribute=name
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        registration:
          my-client-1:
            client-id: "abcd"
            client-secret: "password"
            client-name: "Client for user scope"
            provider: "my-oauth-provider"
            scope: "user"
            redirect-uri: "https://my-redirect-uri.com"
            client-authentication-method: "basic"
            authorization-grant-type: "authorization-code"

          my-client-2:
            client-id: "abcd"
            client-secret: "password"
            client-name: "Client for email scope"
            provider: "my-oauth-provider"
            scope: "email"
            redirect-uri: "https://my-redirect-uri.com"
            client-authentication-method: "basic"
            authorization-grant-type: "authorization_code"

        provider:
          my-oauth-provider:
            authorization-uri: "https://my-auth-server/oauth/authorize"
            token-uri: "https://my-auth-server/oauth/token"
            user-info-uri: "https://my-auth-server/userinfo"
            user-info-authentication-method: "header"
            jwk-set-uri: "https://my-auth-server/token_keys"
            user-name-attribute: "name"

For OpenID Connect providers that support OpenID Connect discovery, the configuration can be further simplified. The provider needs to be configured with an issuer-uri which is the URI that the it asserts as its Issuer Identifier. For example, if the issuer-uri provided is "https://example.com", then an OpenID Provider Configuration Request will be made to "https://example.com/.well-known/openid-configuration". The result is expected to be an OpenID Provider Configuration Response. The following example shows how an OpenID Connect Provider can be configured with the issuer-uri:

Properties
spring.security.oauth2.client.provider.oidc-provider.issuer-uri=https://dev-123456.oktapreview.com/oauth2/default/
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        provider:
          oidc-provider:
            issuer-uri: "https://dev-123456.oktapreview.com/oauth2/default/"

By default, Spring Security’s OAuth2LoginAuthenticationFilter only processes URLs matching /login/oauth2/code/*. If you want to customize the redirect-uri to use a different pattern, you need to provide configuration to process that custom pattern. For example, for servlet applications, you can add your own SecurityFilterChain that resembles the following:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.web.SecurityFilterChain;

@Configuration(proxyBeanMethods = false)
public class MyOAuthClientConfiguration {

    @Bean
    public SecurityFilterChain securityFilterChain(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http.authorizeRequests().anyRequest().authenticated();
        http.oauth2Login().redirectionEndpoint().baseUri("custom-callback");
        return http.build();
    }

}
Spring Boot auto-configures an InMemoryOAuth2AuthorizedClientService which is used by Spring Security for the management of client registrations. The InMemoryOAuth2AuthorizedClientService has limited capabilities and we recommend using it only for development environments. For production environments, consider using a JdbcOAuth2AuthorizedClientService or creating your own implementation of OAuth2AuthorizedClientService.
OAuth2 client registration for common providers

For common OAuth2 and OpenID providers, including Google, Github, Facebook, and Okta, we provide a set of provider defaults (google, github, facebook, and okta, respectively).

If you do not need to customize these providers, you can set the provider attribute to the one for which you need to infer defaults. Also, if the key for the client registration matches a default supported provider, Spring Boot infers that as well.

In other words, the two configurations in the following example use the Google provider:

Properties
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client.client-id=abcd
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client.client-secret=password
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.my-client.provider=google
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.google.client-id=abcd
spring.security.oauth2.client.registration.google.client-secret=password
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      client:
        registration:
          my-client:
            client-id: "abcd"
            client-secret: "password"
            provider: "google"
          google:
            client-id: "abcd"
            client-secret: "password"

4.3.2. Resource Server

If you have spring-security-oauth2-resource-server on your classpath, Spring Boot can set up an OAuth2 Resource Server. For JWT configuration, a JWK Set URI or OIDC Issuer URI needs to be specified, as shown in the following examples:

Properties
spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.jwt.jwk-set-uri=https://example.com/oauth2/default/v1/keys
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      resourceserver:
        jwt:
          jwk-set-uri: "https://example.com/oauth2/default/v1/keys"
Properties
spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.jwt.issuer-uri=https://dev-123456.oktapreview.com/oauth2/default/
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      resourceserver:
        jwt:
          issuer-uri: "https://dev-123456.oktapreview.com/oauth2/default/"
If the authorization server does not support a JWK Set URI, you can configure the resource server with the Public Key used for verifying the signature of the JWT. This can be done using the spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.jwt.public-key-location property, where the value needs to point to a file containing the public key in the PEM-encoded x509 format.

The same properties are applicable for both servlet and reactive applications.

Alternatively, you can define your own JwtDecoder bean for servlet applications or a ReactiveJwtDecoder for reactive applications.

In cases where opaque tokens are used instead of JWTs, you can configure the following properties to validate tokens through introspection:

Properties
spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.opaquetoken.introspection-uri=https://example.com/check-token
spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.opaquetoken.client-id=my-client-id
spring.security.oauth2.resourceserver.opaquetoken.client-secret=my-client-secret
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    oauth2:
      resourceserver:
        opaquetoken:
          introspection-uri: "https://example.com/check-token"
          client-id: "my-client-id"
          client-secret: "my-client-secret"

Again, the same properties are applicable for both servlet and reactive applications.

Alternatively, you can define your own OpaqueTokenIntrospector bean for servlet applications or a ReactiveOpaqueTokenIntrospector for reactive applications.

4.3.3. Authorization Server

Currently, Spring Security does not provide support for implementing an OAuth 2.0 Authorization Server. However, this functionality is available from the Spring Security OAuth project, which will eventually be superseded by Spring Security completely. Until then, you can use the spring-security-oauth2-autoconfigure module to easily set up an OAuth 2.0 authorization server; see its documentation for instructions.

4.4. SAML 2.0

4.4.1. Relying Party

If you have spring-security-saml2-service-provider on your classpath, you can take advantage of some auto-configuration to set up a SAML 2.0 Relying Party. This configuration makes use of the properties under Saml2RelyingPartyProperties.

A relying party registration represents a paired configuration between an Identity Provider, IDP, and a Service Provider, SP. You can register multiple relying parties under the spring.security.saml2.relyingparty prefix, as shown in the following example:

Properties
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.signing.credentials[0].private-key-location=path-to-private-key
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.signing.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-certificate
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.decryption.credentials[0].private-key-location=path-to-private-key
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.decryption.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-certificate
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.identityprovider.verification.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-verification-cert
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.identityprovider.entity-id=remote-idp-entity-id1
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party1.identityprovider.sso-url=https://remoteidp1.sso.url

spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.signing.credentials[0].private-key-location=path-to-private-key
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.signing.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-certificate
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.decryption.credentials[0].private-key-location=path-to-private-key
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.decryption.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-certificate
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.identityprovider.verification.credentials[0].certificate-location=path-to-other-verification-cert
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.identityprovider.entity-id=remote-idp-entity-id2
spring.security.saml2.relyingparty.registration.my-relying-party2.identityprovider.sso-url=https://remoteidp2.sso.url
Yaml
spring:
  security:
    saml2:
      relyingparty:
        registration:
          my-relying-party1:
            signing:
              credentials:
              - private-key-location: "path-to-private-key"
                certificate-location: "path-to-certificate"
            decryption:
              credentials:
              - private-key-location: "path-to-private-key"
                certificate-location: "path-to-certificate"
            identityprovider:
              verification:
                credentials:
                - certificate-location: "path-to-verification-cert"
              entity-id: "remote-idp-entity-id1"
              sso-url: "https://remoteidp1.sso.url"

          my-relying-party2:
            signing:
              credentials:
              - private-key-location: "path-to-private-key"
                certificate-location: "path-to-certificate"
            decryption:
              credentials:
              - private-key-location: "path-to-private-key"
                certificate-location: "path-to-certificate"
            identityprovider:
              verification:
                credentials:
                - certificate-location: "path-to-other-verification-cert"
              entity-id: "remote-idp-entity-id2"
              sso-url: "https://remoteidp2.sso.url"

5. Spring Session

Spring Boot provides Spring Session auto-configuration for a wide range of data stores. When building a servlet web application, the following stores can be auto-configured:

  • JDBC

  • Redis

  • Hazelcast

  • MongoDB

The servlet auto-configuration replaces the need to use @Enable*HttpSession.

When building a reactive web application, the following stores can be auto-configured:

  • Redis

  • MongoDB

The reactive auto-configuration replaces the need to use @Enable*WebSession.

If a single Spring Session module is present on the classpath, Spring Boot uses that store implementation automatically. If you have more than one implementation, you must choose the StoreType that you wish to use to store the sessions. For instance, to use JDBC as the back-end store, you can configure your application as follows:

Properties
spring.session.store-type=jdbc
Yaml
spring:
  session:
    store-type: "jdbc"
You can disable Spring Session by setting the store-type to none.

Each store has specific additional settings. For instance, it is possible to customize the name of the table for the JDBC store, as shown in the following example:

Properties
spring.session.jdbc.table-name=SESSIONS
Yaml
spring:
  session:
    jdbc:
      table-name: "SESSIONS"

For setting the timeout of the session you can use the spring.session.timeout property. If that property is not set with a servlet web application, the auto-configuration falls back to the value of server.servlet.session.timeout.

You can take control over Spring Session’s configuration using @Enable*HttpSession (servlet) or @Enable*WebSession (reactive). This will cause the auto-configuration to back off. Spring Session can then be configured using the annotation’s attributes rather than the previously described configuration properties.

6. Spring HATEOAS

If you develop 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 is customized by setting the various spring.jackson.* properties or, if one exists, by a Jackson2ObjectMapperBuilder bean.

You can take control of Spring HATEOAS’s configuration by using @EnableHypermediaSupport. Note that doing so disables the ObjectMapper customization described earlier.

spring-boot-starter-hateoas is specific to Spring MVC and should not be combined with Spring WebFlux. In order to use Spring HATEOAS with Spring WebFlux, you can add a direct dependency on org.springframework.hateoas:spring-hateoas along with spring-boot-starter-webflux.

7. What to Read Next

You should now have a good understanding of how to develop web applications with Spring Boot. The next few sections describe how Spring Boot integrates with various data technologies, messaging systems, and other IO capabilities. You can pick any of these based on your application’s needs.