Spring Security without web.xml

Question

What is the recommended way to add Spring Security to a web application that is using Spring\'s new WebApplicationInitializer interface instead of the web.xml file?

Answer 1

After a bit of work, I've discovered that it's actually quite simple:

public class Initialiser extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer implements WebApplicationInitializer {

    @Override
    protected Class< ? >[] getRootConfigClasses() {
        return new Class[] { RootConfig.class };
    }

    @Override
    protected Class< ? >[] getServletConfigClasses() {
        return new Class[] { WebAppConfig.class };
    }

    @Override
    protected String[] getServletMappings() {
        return new String[] { "/" };
    }

    @Override
    protected Filter[] getServletFilters() {
        return new Filter[] { new DelegatingFilterProxy("springSecurityFilterChain") };
    }
}

The most important thing, though, is that you must have a root context (e.g. RootConfig in this case), and that must contain a reference to all the spring security information.

Thus, my RootConfig class:

@ImportResource("classpath:spring/securityContext.xml")
@ComponentScan({ "com.example.authentication", "com.example.config" })
@Configuration
public class RootConfig {

    @Bean
    public DatabaseService databaseService() {
        return new DefaultDatabaseService();
    }

    @Bean
    public ExceptionMappingAuthenticationFailureHandler authExceptionMapping() {
        final ExceptionMappingAuthenticationFailureHandler emafh = new ExceptionMappingAuthenticationFailureHandler();
        emafh.setDefaultFailureUrl("/loginFailed");
        final Map mappings = new HashMap<>();
        mappings.put(CredentialsExpiredException.class.getCanonicalName(), "/change_password");
        emafh.setExceptionMappings(mappings);
        return emafh;
    }
}

And spring/securityContext.xml:

I could not get it to work if I merged the RootConfig and WebAppConfig classes into just WebAppConfig and had the following:

@Override
protected Class< ? >[] getRootConfigClasses() {
    return null;
}

@Override
protected Class< ? >[] getServletConfigClasses() {
    return new Class[] { WebAppConfig.class };
}