Serving Static Assets in Spring Boot Applications
Spring Boot provides convenient ways to handle static resources such as images, JavaScript files, and CSS stylesheets. When packaging your application, Spring Boot automatically includes certain directories and excludes others.
Default included directories:
public/**, resources/**, static/**, templates/**, META-INF/resources/**, *
Default excluded directories:
.*, repository/**, build/**, target/**, **/*.jar, **/*.groovy
1. By default, Spring Boot serves static resources from specific locations within your classpath:
classpath:/static
classpath:/public
classpath:/resources
classpath:/META-INF/resources
2. You can configure view resolution in your application.properties file to map to specific directories, though this approach is not recommended:
spring.mvc.view.prefix=/templates/
spring.mvc.view.suffix=.html
3. For more control over static resource serving, you can create a configuration class:
/**
* Custom configuration for static resource handling
*/
@Configuration
public class WebAssetConfig implements WebMvcConfigurer {
@Override
public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
// Map all /assets/** requests to classpath:/assets/
registry.addResourceHandler("/assets/**")
.addResourceLocations("classpath:/assets/");
}
}
Example 1: Custom static resource mapping
@Override
public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
// Map /web-resources/** to classpath:/web-resources/js/
registry.addResourceHandler("/web-resources/**")
.addResourceLocations("classpath:/web-resources/js/");
}
After creating your static resource files, you can access them at: http://localhost:8080/web-resources/sample.html
Example 2: Controller-based mapping
@RequestMapping("/web-content")
public String serveWebContent() {
return "/web-resources/sample.html";
}
Access this at: http://localhost:8080/web-content
