Confusing error message when trying to render a template as a static web page

[berlin-ab]

Starter web applications should be able to return html files without any templating dependency.

[philwebb]

Try putting your HTML in src/main/resources/static. The /templates folder is for templates that need to be processed by Thymeleaf etc.

[berlin-ab]

Maybe the error message could specify the location that it is expecting to find files it is looking for?

[philwebb]

It's a core Spring exception so we can't change it. Perhaps we could offer some strategy to log hints for specific exceptions. That might work well with the development environment idea (i.e. hints are only really needed during development).

[berlin-ab]

Here is an example of what happens when Rails can't find a template:

That's the kind of help that I'm hoping we can add to the Spring exceptions. "There was a problem. I (the framework) was looking for something here, or some configuration there..."

[boostrack]

Is that not a template framework / web technology used ?

AFAIK e.g use Freemarker and you will have better errors than using
velocity.

My 2 cents is that a fancy error page depends on the web view technology
and not spring-boot related.

On Wed, May 14, 2014 at 4:13 PM, Adam Berlin [email protected]:

Here is an example of what happens when Rails can't find a template:

[image: screen shot 2014-05-14 at 10 12 03 am]https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/87432/2972115/d88901ec-db71-11e3-8108-a6a86fbdc22e.png

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/855#issuecomment-43085236
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[berlin-ab]

If you consider Spring Boot is the framework that we are interacting with, as shown here https://spring.io/platform I think that usability improvements for the underlying spring projects belong here in Boot.

[jjwilliams]

So I hate to beat a dead horse here, but I am a Spring Boot new guy, coming from old Spring (its been 2+ years) and am running into this issue using Freemarker. Is there some configuration properties I need to set? Do I put the .html file in /templates or /static? From the error messages I receive it seems like /templates:

Cannot find template location(s): [classpath:/templates/] please add some templates, check your FreeMarker configuration, or set spring.freemarker.checkTemplateLocation=false

[snicoll]

That does not seem to be the same issue to me. The exception message is pretty clear IMO: it tells you that because freemarker is active (sub-text: you added the dependency), then it expects some templates to be found in src/main/resources/templates (or wherever your resources directory of your project is). You html template must be put in /templates but given the exception message, that directory does not even exist.

Does that make sense?

[bclozel]

Fixed in 1.3.x, but this error is still logged - see #2001 for the remaining parts to be fixed.