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

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.

Answer 1

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 {...}.

Answer 2

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("/");
}

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

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");
}
};
}