Spring Security 3 - always return error 302

I believe Spring is redirecting you to /home because you didn't actually authenticated a User through the login process.

  1. You access your web-app through http://mylocal:8080/moon returning the home.jsp view
  2. You click the SignIn button, submitting your login form since no form login is explicitly declared, Spring Security will display the username and password prompt box for the end-user to enter its credentials
  3. These credentials are then POSTed to the login processing URL (/acct/signin) for which you happen to have a mapping with the signin method in the AccountController
  4. Such controller fails to authenticate a User the Spring way, but still redirect the request to /demo by returning a String
  5. The /demo path is protected (.anyRequest().authenticated()) to any unauthenticated user, since the current user is indeed unauthenticated, Spring Security will automatically redirect the request to the login page
  6. You end up on /home (.loginPage("/home"))

Using a InMemoryUserDetailsManagerConfigurer (see inMemoryAuthentication javadoc), you can only successfully login through the configured credentials. If you want a fully-fledged Authentication system, you must provide an UserDetailsService implementation to your Spring Security configuration (through the userDetailsService method).


EDIT : Following the conversation with chialin.lin, it seems the missing configuration was a defaultSuccessfulUrl for Spring Security to know where to redirect the user once authenticated.


For me I came from a little different use-case but 'suddenly' had the same problem before it perfectly worked.
My Setup Spring with a ExtJs frontend where I now build in a rest interface.
It all worked super nice and then suddenly I started having http status 302 responses (WTH?)

Since I implemented by code by following this example: https://octoperf.com/blog/2018/03/08/securing-rest-api-spring-security/
there is a declaration of a SimpleUrlAuthenticationSuccessHandler.
See 4.4 SecurityConfig where the TokenAuthenticationFilter is constructed with a class NoRedirectStrategy; see 4.1 Redirect Strategy

In turn not having this NoRedirectStrategy set up in my extension of the AbstractAuthenticationProcessingFilter it would show me http 302 responses.


To avoid having to create a new trivial SuccessHandler, override the successfulAuthentication method in your filter and just call the chain.doFilter() method after having set the Authentication object in the security context.