How to specify external location for image store in Spring Boot 2.0 web app?

Question

Currently I have images stored in /src/main/resources/static/myimages in the project directory. Now I want to move these outside of project directory like in /Users/tom/myimages so that in img tag src="/myimages/subdir/first.jpg" in the HTML markup will be loaded from /Users/tom/myimages/subdir/first.jpg. How can I achieve this in spring boot 2.0 project?

This will allow me to add new images without having to recompile the project in production environment.

Answer 1

You could achieve this, by PathResourceResolver which is the simplest resolver and its purpose is to find a resource given a public URL pattern. In fact, this is the default resolve.

Code:

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
public class MvcConfig implements WebMvcConfigurer {
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
       registry
               .addResourceHandler("/myimages/**")
               .addResourceLocations("/Users/tom/myimages")
               .setCachePeriod(3600)
               .resourceChain(true)
               .addResolver(new PathResourceResolver());
    }
} 

Description:

• We are registering the PathResourceResolver in the resource chain as the sole ResourceResolver in it.
• the html code that, in conjunction with the PathResourceResolver, locates the /first.jpg file in the /Users/tom/myimages folder

Answer 2

May be you should try to define your own static resource handler ?

It will override the default one.

Something like this:

@Configuration
public class StaticResourceConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addResourceHandler("/**").addResourceLocations("file:/path/to/my/folder/");
    }
}

UPDATE That one is something seems to be work on some of my old projects:

@Configuration
@AutoConfigureAfter(DispatcherServletAutoConfiguration.class)
public class CustomWebMvcAutoConfig extends
                    WebMvcAutoConfiguration.WebMvcAutoConfigurationAdapter {

  @Override
  public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
    String myExternalFilePath = "file:///C:/Users/tom/imgs/";

    registry.addResourceHandler("/imgs/**").addResourceLocations(myExternalFilePath);

    super.addResourceHandlers(registry);
  }

}