Spring serving static content while having wildcard controller route

Question

My application is build using backbone on frontend and spring framework on backend. It is a single html application. Routes are handled by backbone, so I have a backend route with the next structure:

@RequestMapping(value="/**", method=RequestMethod.GET)
public String Pages()
{
    return "index";
}

To point everything to my index.html. The thing is that the static content files are pointed to this route too, and I don't want this. I've tried to config WebMvcConfigurerAdapter by overriding addResourceHandler method for static content, but it doesn't work.

@Configuration
public class StaticResourceConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addResourceHandler("/js/**").addResourceLocations("/resources/js");
    }
}

How can I point every route to my index.html except /js/** and /assets/** ?

Thank you

Answer 1

The first thing is that your controller method that's mapped to /** will be taking priority over any resource requests. You can address this by increasing the precedence of ResourceHandlerRegistry. Add a call to registry.setOrder(Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE) in the addResourceHandlers method of StaticResourceConfiguration:

@Configuration
public class StaticResourceConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.setOrder(Ordered.HIGHEST_PRECEDENCE);
        registry.addResourceHandler("/js/**").addResourceLocations("/resources/js");
    }
}

The second thing is that, by default, Spring Boot configures two resource handlers for you by default, one mapped to /** and one mapped to /webjars/**. Due to the change described above, this will now take priority over the method in your controller that's also mapped to /**. To overcome this, you should turn off default resource handling via a setting in application.properties:

spring.resources.addMappings=false