How to enable HTTP response caching in Spring Boot

Question

I have implemented a REST server using Spring Boot 1.0.2. I'm having trouble preventing Spring from setting HTTP headers that disable HTTP caching.

My controller is as following:

@Controller
public class MyRestController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/someUrl", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public @ResponseBody ResponseEntity<String> myMethod(
            HttpServletResponse httpResponse) throws SQLException {
        return new ResponseEntity<String>("{}", HttpStatus.OK);
    }
}

All HTTP responses contain the following headers:

Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, max-age=0, must-revalidate
Expires: 0
Pragma: no-cache

I've tried the following to remove or change those headers:

1. Call setCacheSeconds(-1) in the controller.
2. Call httpResponse.setHeader("Cache-Control", "max-age=123") in the controller.
3. Define @Bean that returns WebContentInterceptor for which I've called setCacheSeconds(-1).
4. Set property spring.resources.cache-period to -1 or a positive value in application.properties.

None of the above have had any effect. How do I disable or change these headers for all or individual requests in Spring Boot?

Answer 1

Turns out the no-cache HTTP headers are set by Spring Security. This is discussed in http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/#headers.

The following disables the HTTP response header Pragma: no-cache, but doesn't otherwise solve the problem:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.builders.HttpSecurity;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.configuration.WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter;
import org.springframework.security.config.annotation.web.servlet.configuration.EnableWebMvcSecurity;

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvcSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        // Prevent the HTTP response header of "Pragma: no-cache".
        http.headers().cacheControl().disable();
    }
}

I ended up disabling Spring Security completely for public static resources as following (in the same class as above):

@Override
public void configure(WebSecurity web) throws Exception {
    web.ignoring().antMatchers("/static/public/**");
}

This requires configuring two resource handlers to get cache control headers right:

@Configuration
public class MvcConfigurer extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter
        implements EmbeddedServletContainerCustomizer {
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        // Resources without Spring Security. No cache control response headers.
        registry.addResourceHandler("/static/public/**")
            .addResourceLocations("classpath:/static/public/");

        // Resources controlled by Spring Security, which
        // adds "Cache-Control: must-revalidate".
        registry.addResourceHandler("/static/**")
            .addResourceLocations("classpath:/static/")
            .setCachePeriod(3600*24);
    }
}

See also Serving static web resources in Spring Boot & Spring Security application.