How to handle static content in Spring MVC?

Question

I am developing a webapp using Spring MVC 3 and have the DispatcherServlet catching all requests to \'/\' like so (web.xml):

Answer 1

There's another stack overflow post that has an excellent solution.

It doesn't seem to be Tomcat specific, is simple, and works great. I've tried a couple of the solutions in this post with spring mvc 3.1 but then had problems getting my dynamic content served.

In brief, it says add a servlet mapping like this:

<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>default</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/images/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

Answer 2

From Spring 3, all the resources needs to mapped in a different way. You need to use the tag to specify the location of the resources.

Example :

<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />

By doing this way, you are directing the dispatcher servlet to look into the directory resources to look for the static content.

Answer 3

The Problem is with URLPattern

Change your URL pattern on your servlet mapping from "/" to "/*"

Answer 4

I got the same problem and found Joris's answer very helpful. But additionally I need to add

<mvc:annotation-driven /> 

to the servlet config file. Without that resource mapping will not work and all handlers will stop working. Hope this will help someone.

Answer 5

I just add three rules before spring default rule (/**) to tuckey's urlrewritefilter (urlrewrite.xml) to solve the problem

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE urlrewrite PUBLIC "-//tuckey.org//DTD UrlRewrite 3.0//EN" "http://tuckey.org/res/dtds/urlrewrite3.0.dtd">
    <urlrewrite default-match-type="wildcard">
     <rule>
      <from>/</from>
      <to>/app/welcome</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/scripts/**</from>
      <to>/scripts/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/styles/**</from>
      <to>/styles/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/images/**</from>
      <to>/images/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <rule>
      <from>/**</from>
      <to>/app/$1</to>
     </rule>
     <outbound-rule>
      <from>/app/**</from>
      <to>/$1</to>
     </outbound-rule> 
    </urlrewrite>

Answer 6

I know there are a few configurations to use the static contents, but my solution is that I just create a bulk web-application folder within your tomcat. This "bulk webapp" is only serving all the static-contents without serving apps. This is pain-free and easy solution for serving static contents to your actual spring webapp.

For example, I'm using two webapp folders on my tomcat.

1. springapp: it is running only spring web application without static-contents like imgs, js, or css. (dedicated for spring apps.)
2. resources: it is serving only the static contents without JSP, servlet, or any sort of java web application. (dedicated for static-contents)

If I want to use javascript, I simply add the URI for my javascript file.

EX> /resources/path/to/js/myjavascript.js

For static images, I'm using the same method.

EX> /resources/path/to/img/myimg.jpg

Last, I put "security-constraint" on my tomcat to block the access to actual directory. I put "nobody" user-roll to the constraint so that the page generates "403 forbidden error" when people tried to access the static-contents path.

So far it works very well for me. I also noticed that many popular websites like Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook they are using different URI for serving static-contents. To find out this, just right click on any static content and check their URI.