Spring Boot application doesn't work when deployed on JBoss EAP

Environment

• Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP)
  • 6.x

Issue

• Spring Boot application doesn't work when deployed on JBoss EAP
• Spring @RestController returns page not found, 404, when using Spring Boot

Resolution

The [JBoss Web bug](This content is not included.bug 1094248) was fixed in EAP 6.4 Update 1, apply the latest/last Update 24 is recommended.

EAP 6.4 is in ELS-2 , there are no more updates coming, it is recommended to upgrade to a current version of EAP.

As a work-around:

1. If no applications need access to static resources, disable them in the JBoss web subsystem:

<subsystem xmlns="urn:jboss:domain:web:1.5" ...>
  <configuration>
    <static-resources disabled="true"/>
  </configuration>
   ...

2. If the application is simple enough, manually configure the Spring dispatcher in web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd"
      version="3.0">

	<servlet>
		<servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
		<servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
		<init-param>
			<param-name>contextClass</param-name>
			<param-value>org.springframework.web.context.support.AnnotationConfigWebApplicationContext</param-value>
		</init-param>
		<init-param>
			<param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
			<param-value>demo</param-value>
		</init-param>
		<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
	</servlet>

	<servlet-mapping>
		<servlet-name>appServlet</servlet-name>
		<url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
	</servlet-mapping>

</web-app>

Remember to change contextConfigLocation to point to the application's package that contains the Spring configuration classes.

Spring boot application - EAR

When spring boot is packaged as EAR there are some additional changes necessary. See attached example, which can be used like this:

$ mvn clean package
$ ./jboss-cli.sh
$ deploy web-all/target/web-all.ear

This EAR application was tested with JBoss EAP 7.0.x

Root Cause

There is a This content is not included.bug 1094248 in EAP 6 related to JSR-315 Servlet 3.0 specification (http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/jcp/servlet-3.0-fr-eval-oth-JSpec/) section 12.2, where the url pattern "/" should override default servlet mapping, but due to the bug, an application configured this way returns 404.

The bug was an issue related to Servlets, it just happened a user using Spring/Spring Boot hit the issue due to Spring trying to override the default servlet mapping.

Diagnostic Steps

On JBoss CLI, verify if Spring's DispatcherServlet is being registered.

Not working:

[standalone@localhost:9999 /] /deployment=spring-boot-application.war/subsystem=web:read-resource(recursive=true)
{
    "outcome" => "success",
    "result" => {
        "context-root" => "/spring-boot-application",
        "servlet" => undefined,
        "virtual-host" => "default-host"
    }
}

Working:

[standalone@localhost:9999 /] /deployment=spring-boot-application.war/subsystem=web:read-resource(recursive=true)
{
    "outcome" => "success",
    "result" => {
        "context-root" => "/spring-boot-application",
        "virtual-host" => "default-host",
        "servlet" => {"appServlet" => {
            "servlet-class" => "org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet",
            "servlet-name" => "appServlet"
        }}
    }
}

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