Spring Boot project with static content generates 404 when running jar

Question

The recent blog post (https://spring.io/blog/2013/12/19/serving-static-web-content-with-spring-boot) by Spring regarding the use of static web content in Spring Boot projects indicates that several resource directories may be used:

• /META-INF/resources/
• /resources/
• /static/
• /public/

This is thanks to the WebMvcAutoConfiguration class which automatically adds these directories to the classpath. This all seems fine and appears to work when using the spring-boot-maven-plugin spring-boot:run

Answer 1

It turns out that whilst Spring Boot is being clever at adding the various resource directories to the classpath, Maven is not and it's up to you to deal with that part. By default, only src/main/resources will be included in your JAR. If you create a folder called /static in the root of your project (as implied by the blog post) then it will work fine whilst using the spring-boot:run Maven goal but not once you create a JAR.

The easiest solution is to create your /static folder inside /src/main/resources and then Maven will include it in the JAR. Alternative you can add additional resource locations to your Maven project:

<resources>
    <resource>
        <directory>src/main/resources</directory>
    </resource>
    <resource>
        <directory>static</directory>
        <targetPath>static</targetPath>
    </resource>
</resources>

I hope this is useful to someone, it's kind of obvious when you step back and look at how Maven works but it might stump a few people using Spring Boot as it's designed to be pretty much configuration free.