Spring Boot alternative index page

Question

My app uses Spring Boot on the back end and a SPA (Angular) site on the front end. Currently I am serving the index.html page from the webapp folder, which works automatically no configuration needed. Now I integrated a build process for the front end using gulp and all the created sources are "copied" into a build directory. Now I would like to serve the index.html file from the build directory as my main page.

I tried spring.application.index=build/index.htmland some other spring boot settings, but nothing worked. I believe no code is needed from my current code base but if anything is missing let me know.

Is there a way to configure this in the applications.properties file? Do I need to create a controller for the index page? Or is there any other way to change the default behavior?

thanks

Answer 1

Going by the common Spring Boot properties, you should be able to modify this property:

spring.application.index=

Admittedly, I do tend to create a minimal 'home' controller with a @RequestMapping("/") anyway. :)

It's worth noting that the build directory will only be on the classpath if it's under src/main/resources. It's also worth mentioning that the contents of src/main/webapp don't get bundled into the jar automatically. src/main/resources/static is where Spring Boot will look for your static web files. As such, there are a couple of alternatives for you.

Option 1: Configure your Grunt build to output to a directory under src/main/resources/static.

Option 2: Configure your Java build tool to take the Grunt output and put it in your resources directory, so that it's on the classpath. For example, using Maven, the following would move the contents of a directory called build into your src/main/rescources/static.

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>2.6</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>copy-resources</id>
      <phase>validate</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>copy-resources</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <outputDirectory>${basedir}/target/classes/static</outputDirectory>
        <resources>
          <resource>
            <directory>build</directory>
            <filtering>true</filtering>
          </resource>
        </resources>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>