Serving Static resources from file system | Spring Boot Web

Spring Boot Maven Plugin can add extra directories to the classpath. In your case you could include that in your pom.

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${spring.boot.version}</version>
    <configuration>
        <folders>
            <folder>${project.build.directory}/../ext-resources</folder>
        </folders>

        ...
    </configuration>
</plugin>

So that way you don't need inlcude any hard-code in your classes. Simply start your webapp with

mvn spring-boot:run

This is what I did in the WebConfig class, inside the addResourceHandlers method:

boolean devMode = this.env.acceptsProfiles("development");
String location;
if (devMode) {
    String currentPath = new File(".").getAbsolutePath();
    location = "file:///" + currentPath + "/client/src/";
} else {
    location = "classpath:static/";
}

file:/// is an absolute URL pointing to the root of the filesystem and, therefore, file:///./ext-resources/ means that Spring Boot is looking for resources in a directory named ext-resources in the root.

Update your configuration to use something like file:ext-resources/ as the URL.

static resources (eg:html js css etc) can be placed in the same level directory of project or jar, named public. contents will be servered without additional config.