Spring Security exclude url patterns in security annotation configurartion

Question

I have spring web application with Spring security configured using java config approach. I want to exclude some URL patterns from authentication(eg: static resources etc..)

Answer 1

Where are you configuring your authenticated URL pattern(s)? I only see one uri in your code.

Do you have multiple configure(HttpSecurity) methods or just one? It looks like you need all your URIs in the one method.

I have a site which requires authentication to access everything so I want to protect /*. However in order to authenticate I obviously want to not protect /login. I also have static assets I'd like to allow access to (so I can make the login page pretty) and a healthcheck page that shouldn't require auth.

In addition I have a resource, /admin, which requires higher privledges than the rest of the site.

The following is working for me.

@Override
protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {

    http.authorizeRequests()
        .antMatchers("/login**").permitAll()
        .antMatchers("/healthcheck**").permitAll()
        .antMatchers("/static/**").permitAll()
        .antMatchers("/admin/**").access("hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')")
        .antMatchers("/**").access("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
        .and()
            .formLogin().loginPage("/login").failureUrl("/login?error")
                .usernameParameter("username").passwordParameter("password")
        .and()
            .logout().logoutSuccessUrl("/login?logout")
        .and()
            .exceptionHandling().accessDeniedPage("/403")
        .and()
            .csrf();

}

NOTE: This is a first match wins so you may need to play with the order. For example, I originally had /** first:

        .antMatchers("/**").access("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
        .antMatchers("/login**").permitAll()
        .antMatchers("/healthcheck**").permitAll()

Which caused the site to continually redirect all requests for /login back to /login. Likewise I had /admin/** last:

        .antMatchers("/**").access("hasRole('ROLE_USER')")
        .antMatchers("/admin/**").access("hasRole('ROLE_ADMIN')")

Which resulted in my unprivledged test user "guest" having access to the admin interface (yikes!)