Spring Boot Remove Whitelabel Error Page

Question

You need to change your code to the following:

@RestController
public class IndexController implements ErrorController{

    private static final String PATH = "/error";

    @RequestMapping(value = PATH)
    public String error() {
        return "Error handling";
    }

    @Override
    public String getErrorPath() {
        return PATH;
    }
}

Your code did not work, because Spring Boot automatically registers the BasicErrorController as a Spring Bean when you have not specified an implementation of ErrorController.

To see that fact just navigate to ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration.basicErrorController here.

If you want a more "JSONish" response page you can try something like that:

import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.ErrorAttributes;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.ErrorController;
import org.springframework.util.Assert;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;
import org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestAttributes;
import org.springframework.web.context.request.ServletRequestAttributes;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import java.util.Map;

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/error")
public class SimpleErrorController implements ErrorController {

  private final ErrorAttributes errorAttributes;

  @Autowired
  public SimpleErrorController(ErrorAttributes errorAttributes) {
    Assert.notNull(errorAttributes, "ErrorAttributes must not be null");
    this.errorAttributes = errorAttributes;
  }

  @Override
  public String getErrorPath() {
    return "/error";
  }

  @RequestMapping
  public Map<String, Object> error(HttpServletRequest aRequest){
     Map<String, Object> body = getErrorAttributes(aRequest,getTraceParameter(aRequest));
     String trace = (String) body.get("trace");
     if(trace != null){
       String[] lines = trace.split("\n\t");
       body.put("trace", lines);
     }
     return body;
  }

  private boolean getTraceParameter(HttpServletRequest request) {
    String parameter = request.getParameter("trace");
    if (parameter == null) {
        return false;
    }
    return !"false".equals(parameter.toLowerCase());
  }

  private Map<String, Object> getErrorAttributes(HttpServletRequest aRequest, boolean includeStackTrace) {
    RequestAttributes requestAttributes = new ServletRequestAttributes(aRequest);
    return errorAttributes.getErrorAttributes(requestAttributes, includeStackTrace);
  }
}

Spring boot doc 'was' wrong (they have since fixed it) :

To switch it off you can set error.whitelabel.enabled=false

should be

To switch it off you can set server.error.whitelabel.enabled=false

You can remove it completely by specifying:

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.servlet.error.ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration;
...
@Configuration
@EnableAutoConfiguration(exclude = {ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration.class})
public static MainApp { ... }

However, do note that doing so will probably cause servlet container's whitelabel pages to show up instead :)

---

EDIT: Another way to do this is via application.yaml. Just put in the value:

spring:
  autoconfigure:
    exclude: org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.servlet.error.ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration

Documentation

For Spring Boot < 2.0, the class is located in package org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.web.

Manual here says that you have to set server.error.whitelabel.enabled to false to disable the standard error page. Maybe it is what you want?

I am experiencing the same error after adding /error mapping, by the way.

With Spring Boot > 1.4.x you could do this:

@SpringBootApplication(exclude = {ErrorMvcAutoConfiguration.class})
public class MyApi {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    SpringApplication.run(App.class, args);
  }
}

but then in case of exception the servlet container will display its own error page.