By default, where does Spring Boot expect views to be stored?

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The Solution

I found the answer via trial-and-error, which turned out rather annoying. I hope someone can correct me if this conclusion is wrong, but it appears that Spring Boot does not like the string WEB-INF. I renamed the WEB-INF directory to view and changed the application.properties to the following and the view loaded successfully.

spring.mvc.view.prefix=/view/
spring.mvc.view.suffix=.jsp

Additional Findings

The objective of this exercise was to create a working example of a minimal, Java-based configuration so I continued minimalising the setup. I then found that lots of advice dished out on multiple SO threads and forums did not help. @JBNizet provided a link in his comment to the Spring Boot docs which lists a very salient point that no one has mentioned: JSPs simply do not play well with Spring Boot as it has limitations depending on the embedded container chosen. With that in mind, I decided to try replacing JSPs with ThymeLeaf templates.

My new working config removes the need for these:

  • No need to add application.properties: spring.mvc.view.prefix + spring.mvc.view.suffix
  • No need to change the packaging type from jar to war
  • No need to modify main class
  • No need to add pom.xml dependencies for
    • org.springframework.boot / spring-boot-starter-tomcat
    • org.springframework.boot / tomcat-embed-jasper
    • javax.servlet / jstl

So just the default Spring Boot template and 2 ThymeLeaf dependencies with the views named as ViewName.html placed in src/main/resources/templates.

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf</artifactId>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-spring4</artifactId>
</dependency>

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