Spring boot single page application - forward every request to index.html

Question

I have a Spring Boot (v1.3.6) single page application (angular2) and i want to forward all request to the index.html.

A request to http://localhost:8080/index.html is working (200 and i get the index.html) but http://localhost:8080/home is not (404).

Runner.class

@SpringBootApplication
@ComponentScan({"packagea.packageb"})
@EnableAutoConfiguration
public class Runner {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        ConfigurableApplicationContext run = SpringApplication.run(Runner.class, args);
    }
}

WebAppConfig.class

@Configuration
@EnableScheduling
@EnableAsync
public class WebAppConfig extends WebMvcConfigurationSupport {

    private static final int CACHE_PERIOD_ONE_YEAR = 31536000;

    private static final int CACHE_PERIOD_NO_CACHE = 0;

    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.setOrder(-1);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/styles.css").addResourceLocations("/styles.css").setCachePeriod(CACHE_PERIOD_ONE_YEAR);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/app/third-party/**").addResourceLocations("/node_modules/").setCachePeriod(CACHE_PERIOD_ONE_YEAR);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/app/**").addResourceLocations("/app/").setCachePeriod(CACHE_PERIOD_NO_CACHE);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/systemjs.config.js").addResourceLocations("/systemjs.config.js").setCachePeriod(CACHE_PERIOD_NO_CACHE);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/**").addResourceLocations("/index.html").setCachePeriod(CACHE_PERIOD_NO_CACHE);
    }

}

styles.css, /app/third-party/xyz/xyz.js,.. are working (200 and i get the correct file). Only /** to index.html is not working.

@duardito the `index.html` is in the same folder (`webapp`) as `styles.css` — Christoph, Aug 05 '16 at 08:02
so, if there is no matching resource to "/home" , i think it is normal this 404 error because this page doesn't exists, and no endpoint in your backend is matching "/home", so everytime to make a request to your backend with "/home" you will get 404 error, because there is no matching endpoint. — duardito, Aug 05 '16 at 10:35
My goal was to match with `/**` every request and forward them to `index.html`. — Christoph, Aug 05 '16 at 10:59

Jean Marois · Answer 1 · 2016-09-21T19:42:14.960

44

You can also add a forwarding controller like:

@Controller
public class ForwardingController {
    @RequestMapping("/{path:[^\\.]+}/**")
    public String forward() {
        return "forward:/";
    }
}

The first part {path:[^\\.]+} matches one or more of any character other than .. This makes sure request for a file.ext doesn't get handled by this RequestMapping. If you need to support sub-paths to also be forwarded, put /** outside of the {...}.

edited Sep 21 '16 at 19:42

answered Sep 21 '16 at 19:30

Jean Marois

1,510
11
19

1

See http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-ann-requestmapping-uri-templates-regex for an explanation of the {varName:regex} form allowing more complicated regex-based matching. – Jean Marois Sep 21 '16 at 19:47
Since I forward my requests to "/ui/index.html", I had to adjust the path mapping to "/**/{path:[^\\.]+}" in order to avoid stack overflow exception due to it matching paths which have a period character in the last component. – Shannon Dec 28 '17 at 21:09
6

`"/{path:[^\\.]+}/**"` can't handle static files in subdirectories. `"/**/{path:[^\\.]+}"` works fine – basil Mar 25 '18 at 13:04
Best answer ever! – sparkyspider Sep 01 '19 at 15:27
1

@basil the expression `"/**/{path:[^\\.]+}"` does not work anymore with spring boot 2.6.. It states: `Invalid mapping pattern detected: /**/{path:[^\\.]+}, No more pattern data allowed after {*...} or ** pattern element` – fischermatte Oct 06 '22 at 13:12

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 12 '18 at 21:47

5

This one didn't work for me:

return "forward:/";

Thanks to Spring MVC @RestController and redirect I found a nicely working solution:

@RequestMapping(value = "/{[path:[^\\.]*}")
public void redirect(HttpServletResponse response) throws IOException {
    response.sendRedirect("/");
}

answered Feb 12 '18 at 21:47

Flo

189
2
7

You need Thymeleaf templating for "forward:/" to work. – Ondřej Stašek Jan 02 '20 at 14:07

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 05 '16 at 16:40

Without looking at logs I'm not entirely sure why its not being mapped correctly, however if you want to map URLs to a view (HTML) then you will probably be better off using the viewController mechanism spring provides http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/3.2.x/spring-framework-reference/html/mvc.html#mvc-config-view-controller. e.g.

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

  @Override
  public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
    registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("home");
  }

}

(taken from spring docs linked above - this is how you should map a url to a view rather than re-purposing the mapping for static resources.)

I'm not sure if there is any kind of suffix filtering for the resource mapping - e.g. I don't know how spring decides to map requests to the ResourceHttpRequestHandler - have you tried (just to confirm or deny) whether something like http://localhost:8080/home.html amps to anything?

It's also possible that the html mapping you have defined above is just being ignored and the index.html is just working because of Spring-Boot's default home page behaviour: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/master/spring-boot-autoconfigure/src/main/java/org/springframework/boot/autoconfigure/web/ResourceProperties.java#L108

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 20 '16 at 19:58

I had the same problem and the following worked for me. My html files are inside src/main/resources/static/app

The key was to remove @EnableWebMvc and add "classpath:/static/app/" to addResourceLocations! Hope this helps.

private static final String[] CLASSPATH_RESOURCE_LOCATIONS = {
        "classpath:/META-INF/resources/", "classpath:/resources/",
        "classpath:/static/","classpath:/static/app/", "classpath:/public/" };

@Bean
public WebMvcConfigurer webMvcConfigurer() {
    return new WebMvcConfigurerAdapter() {

        @Override
        public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
            if (!registry.hasMappingForPattern("/webjars/**")) {
                registry.addResourceHandler("/webjars/**").addResourceLocations(
                        "classpath:/META-INF/resources/webjars/");
            }
            if (!registry.hasMappingForPattern("/**")) {
                registry.addResourceHandler("/**").addResourceLocations(
                        CLASSPATH_RESOURCE_LOCATIONS);
            }
        }


        @Override
        public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
            // forward requests to /admin and /user to their index.html
            registry.addViewController("/portal").setViewName(
                    "forward:/app/index.html");
        }
    };
}

Spring boot single page application - forward every request to index.html

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