Remove webjars version from url

Question

We are using webjars with maven in our project. So we have hundreds of JSPs with code like this:

<%--JSP CODE--%>
<script src="<c:url value="/webjars/jquery/2.2.0/jquery.min.js" />" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<c:url value="/webjars/bootstrap/3.3.6/js/bootstrap.min.js" />" type="text/javascript"></script>
.........

And as you can guess it's a cumbersome work to update to newer versions of webjars. So I'm looking for the solution which will allow me to import scripts like this:

<%--JSP CODE--%>
<script src="<c:url value="/webjars/jquery/jquery.min.js" />" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="<c:url value="/webjars/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js" />" type="text/javascript"></script>
.........

Basically I want to remove a webjar version from url. Can you propose nice and simple solution for this problem?

So far I come up with resource servlet which can guess which file to return by the url. But this solution involves full resource scanning at the start of an application.

If you use minifying you can create those js files into a separate folder and with a name which does not contain the version... — khmarbaise, Feb 21 '16 at 14:23

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 21 '16 at 13:47

Take a look at webjars-locator project, you can use it to create proper request controller.

In case of using Spring MVC this would be:

@ResponseBody
@RequestMapping("/webjarslocator/{webjar}/**")
public ResponseEntity locateWebjarAsset(@PathVariable String webjar, HttpServletRequest request) {
    try {
        String mvcPrefix = "/webjarslocator/" + webjar + "/"; // This prefix must match the mapping path!
        String mvcPath = (String) request.getAttribute(HandlerMapping.PATH_WITHIN_HANDLER_MAPPING_ATTRIBUTE);
        String fullPath = assetLocator.getFullPath(webjar, mvcPath.substring(mvcPrefix.length()));
        return new ResponseEntity(new ClassPathResource(fullPath), HttpStatus.OK);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        return new ResponseEntity<>(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
    }
}

Disclaimer: This is the code from WebJars documentation (section Making dependencies version agnostic).

In this case you can ask for js libraries in following way:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='/webjarslocator/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css'>

Please note that there's no version in this url.

You can also try to optimize this requests (and consequently - filesystem scans) by using cache, but I am almost sure that some kind of cache is already involved in webjars-locator (I haven't checked that).

you can put an example that does not use `spring` or any other framework only `maven`??? — abrahamhs, May 09 '18 at 18:11

Remove webjars version from url

1 Answers1