Spring Security - Form based authentication

In this post, we will use Spring security to handle form based authentication. You can also read my previous posts on Basic Authentication and Digest Authentication.

Technologies/ Frameworks used

Spring Boot, Spring Security, Thymeleaf, AngularJS, Bootstrap

Adding depedencies in pom.xml

In the example, we will use Spring Boot, Spring Security, Undertow and thymeleaf and will add their starters as shown below.

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    <exclusions>
      <exclusion>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
      </exclusion>
    </exclusions>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-undertow</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.thymeleaf.extras</groupId>
    <artifactId>thymeleaf-extras-springsecurity4</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.2.RELEASE</version>
  </dependency>
</dependencies>

Spring Security Configurations

We will extend WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter class which is a convenient base class to create WebSecurityConfigurer.

@EnableWebSecurity
public class SecurityConfig extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {
  @Override
  protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
    http.csrf().disable()
        .authorizeRequests()
            .antMatchers("/static/**", "/", "/index", "/bower_components/**").permitAll()
            .anyRequest().authenticated()
            .and()
        .formLogin()
            .loginPage("/login")
            .permitAll()
            .and()
        .logout()
            .permitAll();
  }
 
  @Bean
  public UserDetailsService userDetailsService() {
    InMemoryUserDetailsManager manager = new InMemoryUserDetailsManager();
    manager.createUser(User.withUsername("gaurav").password("s3cr3t").roles("USER").build());
    return manager;
  }
 
  @Bean
  SpringSecurityDialect securityDialect() {
    return new SpringSecurityDialect();
  }
}

@EnableWebSecurity annotation enables the Spring Security. We have overridden the configure method and configured the security. In the above code, we have disabled the csrf request support (By default it is enabled). We are authorizing all the requests to /index, /,/static folder and sub-folders, bower_components folder and its sub-folder accessible without authentication but all other should be authenticated. We are referring /login as our login page for authentication.

In the above code snippet, we are also registering the UserDetailsService. When we enable web-security in Spring, it expects a bean of type UserDetailsService which is used to get UserDetails. For example purpose, I am using InMemoryUserDetailsManager provided by the Spring.

MVC configuration

@Configuration
public class MvcConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {
  @Override
  public void addViewControllers(ViewControllerRegistry registry) {
    registry.addViewController("/viewUsers").setViewName("viewUsers");
    registry.addViewController("/index").setViewName("index");
    registry.addViewController("/").setViewName("index");
    registry.addViewController("/login").setViewName("login");
  }
}

In the above configurations, we are registering ViewController and setting their names. This is all configuration that we need to do to enable Spring Security. You can find the full working project including the html files on Github.