Serve Static Resources with Spring Boot

by Hussein Terek · May 28, 2018

In this tutorial we show how Spring Boot serves static resources like (html, js, css) in a web application.

1- Default path for static resources

By default Spring Boot serves static resources defined under the following paths:

/META-INF/resources/
/resources/
/static/
/public/

Except for index.html which is served as the root resource when accessing the root URL of a Spring Boot application, this page need not exist under the above paths.

In order to change the default paths of static resources, you can define “spring.resources.static-locations” attribute under application.properties as the following:

1	spring.resources.static-locations=/html/,/js/,/css/

2- Welcome page

By default, Spring boot serves index.html as the root resource when accessing the root URL of a web application.

In order to define your own root resource, you can map the root path ‘/’ inside your controller and return your own html as the following:

@Controller

public class HomeController {

@RequestMapping("/")

public String welcome(Map<String, Object> model) {

return "home.html";

}

home.html should exist under any of these paths:

src/main/resources/META-INF/resources/home.html
src/main/resources/resources/home.html
src/main/resources/static/home.html
src/main/resources/public/home.html

3- Serve HTML files from Controller

In order to return an HTML view from a controller, you need to return its full name plus the extension knowing that it’s located under any of the paths defined in step-1.

Here below we map /home URL to load home.html view: