How to build Spring Boot WEB application with Freemarker (Update to Spring Boot 2.6 and Java 17)

This article demonstrate: How to build a Spring Boot WEB applicaiton with Freemarker.

Why use the Freemarker in Spring Boot Web Application

As a relatively obsolete technology，By default, the Freemarker is not used as a template for web page rendering in Spring Boot 2, However, in the face of some old system upgrades written in Freemarker, you may also want to be able to configure support for Freemarker.

Next, let’s build a Spring Boot Web Application from scratch and then add support for Freemarker.

Development Environment

In tutorial, we use the following softeware environment, and all softwares are free.

Java: JDK 17 Oracle JDK 17, download it from Offical Website

IDE: IntelliJ IDEA 2021.3.1 Community, download it from Offical Website

Generate a Spring Boot Web Application Example

In Spring Boot Starter, fill in the basic configuration information(Artifact: todo-restful-service) of the project and the third-party components that need to be used in the project.

In this turorail, we suggest to choose:

‘Java’ as the language
‘Maven Project’ as the Project (type)
the version of Spring Boot chooses the latest stable version 2.6.3.
‘Jar’ as the package (type)
the version of Java choose Java 17

And choose the following dependencies:

Spring Web
Freemarker

After completed the above steps, click the “Generate” button to download the generated project basic package. Unizip it and open it with IntelliJ IDEA IDE.

Create a Spring MVC Controller

In Spring Boot Web Application, each HTTP request can be configured to respond with a corresponding method in the Controller. In this case, we built a Controller to respond to the root path.

Create a new package named controller and create a new class in the package named IndexController, as follows:


@Controller
@RequestMapping("/")
public class IndexController {

    @GetMapping
    public String index() {
        
        return "index";
    }
}

About the more information about spring mvc controller, you can refer the Offical Documentation

Create a Freemarker page

In src/main/template folder, create an new file, named: index.ftl. And fill the following content into it:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>Hello Freemarker!</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Hello Freemarker</h2>
</body>
</html>

Configure Freemarker view

Rename the application.properties file in src/main/resources: application.yml, and add the following:

spring:
  freemarker:
    cache: false
    template-loader-paht: classpath:/templates
    suffix: .ftl

Run Web Application

Run the Web Application

If you run it in console, you can execute:

1	mvn spring-boot:run

If you use IDE tools, you can call maven in the IDE menu to run the application.

After the application is running, you can access the following URL via your browse.

1	http://localhost:8080

You can see something like this in your browser

1	Hello Freemarker!

Download the Code

You can download the completed code from GitHub