Redirect unknown requests to index.html in springboot

Question

I'm trying to get an Angular2 app served up through a springboot web application. I've found lots of examples of how to do this very simply:

https://spring.io/blog/2015/01/12/spring-and-angular-js-a-secure-single-page-application#using-spring-boot-cli

https://github.com/zouabimourad/angular2-spring/tree/master/front

https://github.com/ehirsch/spring-angular2

However, these examples are very simple, and they just basically show how to display static content that happens to be Angular.

None of them show how to handle any of the URLs (I think they're called routes) the Angular2 app uses that don't map to "real" resources.

Eg. We have a "/login" route in the Angular app, but we don't have a @Controller/@RequestMapping("/login") for this, I want Spring to render index.html when it see's a request for "/login".

Generically - I want Spring to render "index.html" whenever it can't an actual resource. Is there a way to set a default view for all requests that can't be mapped to something or found?

I've tackled this before by using an htaccess file and have apache handle this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteRule . index.html [L]
   ErrorDocument 404 /index.html
</IfModule>

But I can't use apache or nginx in this case.

Answer 1

As a work-a-round I've added the Angular Routes in a RequestMapping annotation and pointed them all at the index.html:

@RequestMapping({"/login", "/logout"})
public String index() { return "index.html"; }

Edit: As a better work-a-round, you can make the controller implement ErrorController, override the getErrorPath method, then add a mapping for /error which will act as a catch-all (or mapping missing) method.

@Controller
public class TheOneController implements ErrorController {

    @RequestMapping("/error")
    public String index() {
        return "index.html";
    }

    @Override
    public String getErrorPath() {
        return "index.html";
    }
}

Now the index method will handle anything that can't be found and render the index.html.