DispatcherServlet Mapping (Spring Boot)

Spring Boot provides the spring-boot-starter-web library for developing web applications using Spring MVC. One of the main features of Spring Boot is autoconfiguration. The Spring Boot autoconfiguration registers and configures the DispatcherServlet automatically. Therefore, we don’t need to register the DispatcherServlet manually.

By default, the spring-boot-starter-web starter configures DispatcherServlet to the URL pattern “/”. So, we don't need to complete any additional configuration for the above DispatcherServlet example in the web.xml file. However, we can customize the URL pattern using server.servlet.* in the application.properties file:

server.servlet.context-path=/demo
spring.mvc.servlet.path=/baeldung

DispatcherServlet is configured to handle the URL pattern /baeldung and the root contextPath will be /demo. Thus, DispatcherServlet listens at http://localhost:8080/demo/baeldung/.