spring boot - how to correctly define template locations?

Question

After struggling for some time with a Spring app (and spring boot, for that matter), it seems I'm finally about to get it working.

I have shifted through dependency resolutions and maven build already. Application starts (and very quickly!) but when I try to access

localhost:8080

I get the following browser message whenever I try to reach the application's landing page:

HTTP Status 500 - Request processing failed; nested exception is org.thymeleaf.exceptions.TemplateInputException: Error resolving template "home/homeNotSignedIn", template might not exist or might not be accessible by any of the configured Template Resolvers

The src/main/resourcesfolder is

src/main/resources
    static // CSS, IMG and JS
    templates // html
    application.properties
    log4j.properties

Now, I understand I may be mixing concepts, but on my ApplicationConfiguration.java I have this:

@Configuration
@EnableWebMvc
@ComponentScan(basePackages = "b.c.g.c")
public class ApplicationConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    @Bean
    @Description("Thymeleaf template resolver serving HTML 5")
    public ServletContextTemplateResolver templateResolver() {
        ServletContextTemplateResolver templateResolver = new ServletContextTemplateResolver();
        templateResolver.setCacheable(false);
        templateResolver.setTemplateMode("HTML5");
        templateResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        templateResolver.setPrefix("classpath:/templates/");
        templateResolver.setSuffix(".html");

        return templateResolver;
    }

    @Bean
    @Description("Thymeleaf template engine with Spring integration")
    public SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine() {
        SpringTemplateEngine templateEngine = new SpringTemplateEngine();
        templateEngine.addDialect(new SpringSecurityDialect());
        templateEngine.addDialect(new LayoutDialect(new GroupingStrategy()));
        templateEngine.setTemplateResolver(templateResolver());

        return templateEngine;
    }

    @Bean
    @Description("Thymeleaf view resolver")
    public ViewResolver viewResolver() {

        ThymeleafViewResolver viewResolver = new ThymeleafViewResolver();
        viewResolver.setTemplateEngine(templateEngine());
        viewResolver.setCharacterEncoding("UTF-8");
        viewResolver.setCache(false);
        viewResolver.setOrder(1);

        return viewResolver;
    }

    // other beans
}

And, on application.properties, I have this:

spring.thymeleaf.check-template-location=true
spring.thymeleaf.prefix=classpath:templates/
spring.thymeleaf.suffix=.html
spring.thymeleaf.mode=HTML5
spring.thymeleaf.encoding=UTF-8
spring.thymeleaf.content-type=text/html
spring.thymeleaf.cache=false

Though I see these excerpts tell the same thing, I bet one can go, right?

So, two questions, actually,

1) how to make sure Spring + Thymeleaf understand where to find the templates?

2) how to get the application to answer to localhost:8080/appName instead of localhost:8080/?

Answer 1

Recommended Approach
I will first answer your second question

1. You have define the application.properties or application.yml (Yaml is better) file in src/main/resources. Spring-Boot comes with default properties file where you can set your context path (look for webproperties), port everything.

    server.context-path=/<appname>
   

2. To answer your second question spring-boot you can refer the thymeleaf configurations in the properties file.