The Registration Process With Spring Security

Last updated: February 6, 2025

Written by: baeldung

Spring Security

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This article is part of a series:

• Spring Security Registration Series

• The Registration Process With Spring Security (current article)

• Registration – Activate a New Account by Email
• Spring Security Registration – Resend Verification Email
• Registration with Spring Security – Password Encoding
• The Registration API becomes RESTful
• Spring Security – Reset Your Password
• Registration – Password Strength and Rules
• Updating Your Password
• Notify User of Login From New Device or Location

1. Overview

In this tutorial, we’ll implement a basic registration process with Spring Security. We’ll be building on top of the concepts we explored in the previous article, where we looked at login.

The goal here is to add a full registration process that allows a user to sign up, as well as validates and persists user data.

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2. The Registration Page

First, we’ll implement a simple registration page displaying the following fields:

name (first and last name)
email
password (and password confirmation field)

The following example shows a simple registration.html page:

Example 2.1.

<html>
<body>
<h1 th:text="#{label.form.title}">form</h1>
<form action="/" th:object="${user}" method="POST" enctype="utf8">
    <div>
        <label th:text="#{label.user.firstName}">first</label>
        <input th:field="*{firstName}"/>
        <p th:each="error: ${#fields.errors('firstName')}" 
          th:text="${error}">Validation error</p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <label th:text="#{label.user.lastName}">last</label>
        <input th:field="*{lastName}"/>
        <p th:each="error : ${#fields.errors('lastName')}" 
          th:text="${error}">Validation error</p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <label th:text="#{label.user.email}">email</label>
        <input type="email" th:field="*{email}"/>
        <p th:each="error : ${#fields.errors('email')}" 
          th:text="${error}">Validation error</p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <label th:text="#{label.user.password}">password</label>
        <input type="password" th:field="*{password}"/>
        <p th:each="error : ${#fields.errors('password')}" 
          th:text="${error}">Validation error</p>
    </div>
    <div>
        <label th:text="#{label.user.confirmPass}">confirm</label>
        <input type="password" th:field="*{matchingPassword}"/>
    </div>
    <button type="submit" th:text="#{label.form.submit}">submit</button>
</form>

<a th:href="@{/login.html}" th:text="#{label.form.loginLink}">login</a>
</body>
</html>

3. The User DTO Object

We need a Data Transfer Object to send all of the registration information to our Spring backend. The DTO object should have all the information we’ll require later on when we create and populate our User object:

public class UserDto {
    @NotNull
    @NotEmpty
    private String firstName;
    
    @NotNull
    @NotEmpty
    private String lastName;
    
    @NotNull
    @NotEmpty
    private String password;
    private String matchingPassword;
    
    @NotNull
    @NotEmpty
    private String email;
    
    // standard getters and setters
}

Note that we used standard javax.validation annotations on the fields of the DTO object. Later on, we’ll also implement our own custom validation annotations to validate the format of the email address, as well as the password confirmation (see Section 5).

4. The Registration Controller

A Sign-Up link on the login page will take the user to the registration page. The back end for that page lives in the registration controller and is mapped to “/user/registration”:

Example 4.1. The showRegistration Method

@GetMapping("/user/registration")
public String showRegistrationForm(WebRequest request, Model model) {
    UserDto userDto = new UserDto();
    model.addAttribute("user", userDto);
    return "registration";
}

When the controller receives the request “/user/registration,” it creates the new UserDto object, which backs the registration form, binds it, and returns.

5. Validating Registration Data

Next, we’ll look at the validations that the controller will perform when registering a new account:

All required fields are filled (No empty or null fields).
The email address is valid (well-formed).
The password confirmation field matches the password field.
The account doesn’t already exist.

5.1. The Built-In Validation

For the simple checks, we’ll use the out of the box bean validation annotations on the DTO object. These are annotations like @NotNull, @NotEmpty, etc.

Then, to trigger the validation process, we’ll simply annotate the object in the controller layer with the @Valid annotation:

public ModelAndView registerUserAccount(@ModelAttribute("user") @Valid UserDto userDto,
  HttpServletRequest request, Errors errors) {
    //...
}

5.2. Custom Validation to Check Email Validity

Then we’ll validate the email address and make sure it’s well-formed. For this, we’ll build a custom validator, as well as a custom validation annotation; we’ll call it @ValidEmail.

It’s important to note that we’re rolling our own custom annotation instead of Hibernate’s @Email because Hibernate considers the old intranet addresses format, myaddress@myserver, as valid (see Stackoverflow article), which isn’t good.

So here’s the email validation annotation and the custom validator:

Example 5.2.1. The Custom Annotation for Email Validation

@Target({TYPE, FIELD, ANNOTATION_TYPE})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = EmailValidator.class)
@Documented
public @interface ValidEmail {
    String message() default "Invalid email";
    Class<?>[] groups() default {};
    Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default {};
}

Note that we defined the annotation at the FIELD level, since that’s where it applies conceptually.

Example 5.2.2. The Custom EmailValidator:

public class EmailValidator 
  implements ConstraintValidator<ValidEmail, String> {
    
    private Pattern pattern;
    private Matcher matcher;
    private static final String EMAIL_PATTERN = "^[_A-Za-z0-9-+]+
        (.[_A-Za-z0-9-]+)*@" + "[A-Za-z0-9-]+(.[A-Za-z0-9]+)*
        (.[A-Za-z]{2,})$"; 
    @Override
    public void initialize(ValidEmail constraintAnnotation) {
    }
    @Override
    public boolean isValid(String email, ConstraintValidatorContext context){
        return (validateEmail(email));
    } 
    private boolean validateEmail(String email) {
        pattern = Pattern.compile(EMAIL_PATTERN);
        matcher = pattern.matcher(email);
        return matcher.matches();
    }
}

Then we’ll use the new annotation on our UserDto implementation:

@ValidEmail
@NotNull
@NotEmpty
private String email;

5.3. Using Custom Validation for Password Confirmation

We also need a custom annotation and validator to make sure that the password and matchingPassword fields match up:

Example 5.3.1. The Custom Annotation for Validating Password Confirmation

@Target({TYPE,ANNOTATION_TYPE})
@Retention(RUNTIME)
@Constraint(validatedBy = PasswordMatchesValidator.class)
@Documented
public @interface PasswordMatches {
    String message() default "Passwords don't match";
    Class<?>[] groups() default {};
    Class<? extends Payload>[] payload() default {};
}

Note that the @Target annotation indicates that this is a TYPE level annotation. This is because we need the entire UserDto object to perform the validation.

The custom validator that will be called by this annotation is shown below:

Example 5.3.2. The PasswordMatchesValidator Custom Validator

public class PasswordMatchesValidator
  implements ConstraintValidator<PasswordMatches, Object> {
    
    @Override
    public void initialize(PasswordMatches constraintAnnotation) {
    }
    @Override
    public boolean isValid(Object obj, ConstraintValidatorContext context){
        UserDto user = (UserDto) obj;
        return user.getPassword().equals(user.getMatchingPassword());
    }
}

Then the @PasswordMatches annotation should be applied to our UserDto object:

@PasswordMatches
public class UserDto {
    //...
}

All custom validations are, of course, evaluated along with all standard annotations when the entire validation process runs.

5.4. Check That the Account Doesn’t Already Exist

The fourth check we’ll implement is verifying that the email account doesn’t already exist in the database.

This is performed after the form has been validated, and it’s done with the help of the UserService implementation.

Example 5.4.1. The Controller’s registerUserAccount Method Calls the UserService Object

@PostMapping("/user/registration")
public ModelAndView registerUserAccount(
  @ModelAttribute("user") @Valid UserDto userDto,
  HttpServletRequest request,
  Errors errors) {
    
    try {
        User registered = userService.registerNewUserAccount(userDto);
    } catch (UserAlreadyExistException uaeEx) {
        mav.addObject("message", "An account for that username/email already exists.");
        return mav;
    }

    // rest of the implementation
}

Example 5.4.2. UserService Checks for Duplicate Emails

@Service
@Transactional
public class UserService implements IUserService {
    @Autowired
    private UserRepository repository;
    
    @Override
    public User registerNewUserAccount(UserDto userDto) throws UserAlreadyExistException {
        if (emailExists(userDto.getEmail())) {
            throw new UserAlreadyExistException("There is an account with that email address: "
              + userDto.getEmail());
        }

        // the rest of the registration operation
    }
    private boolean emailExists(String email) {
        return userRepository.findByEmail(email) != null;
    }
}

The UserService relies on the UserRepository class to check if a user with a given email address already exists in the database.

The actual implementation of the UserRepository in the persistence layer isn’t relevant for the current article; however, one quick way is to use Spring Data to generate the repository layer.

6. Persisting Data and Finishing-Up Form Processing

Next, we’ll implement the registration logic in our controller layer:

Example 6.1. The RegisterAccount Method in the Controller

@PostMapping("/user/registration")
public ModelAndView registerUserAccount(
  @ModelAttribute("user") @Valid UserDto userDto,
  HttpServletRequest request,
  Errors errors) {
    
    try {
        User registered = userService.registerNewUserAccount(userDto);
    } catch (UserAlreadyExistException uaeEx) {
        mav.addObject("message", "An account for that username/email already exists.");
        return mav;
    }

    return new ModelAndView("successRegister", "user", userDto);
}

Things to notice in the code above:

The controller is returning a ModelAndView object, which is the convenient class for sending model data (user) tied to the view.
The controller will redirect to the registration form if there are any errors set at validation time.

7. **The UserService – Register Operation**

Finally, we’ll finish the implementation of the registration operation in the UserService:

Example 7.1. The IUserService Interface

public interface IUserService {
    User registerNewUserAccount(UserDto userDto);
}

Example 7.2. The UserService Class

@Service
@Transactional
public class UserService implements IUserService {
    @Autowired
    private UserRepository repository;
    
    @Override
    public User registerNewUserAccount(UserDto userDto) throws UserAlreadyExistException {
        if (emailExists(userDto.getEmail())) {
            throw new UserAlreadyExistException("There is an account with that email address: "
              + userDto.getEmail());
        }

        User user = new User();
        user.setFirstName(userDto.getFirstName());
        user.setLastName(userDto.getLastName());
        user.setPassword(userDto.getPassword());
        user.setEmail(userDto.getEmail());
        user.setRoles(Arrays.asList("ROLE_USER"));

        return repository.save(user);
    }

    private boolean emailExists(String email) {
        return userRepository.findByEmail(email) != null;
    }
}

In our previous article, the login used hard-coded credentials. We’ll change that by using the newly registered user information and credentials. Furthermore, we’ll implement a custom UserDetailsService to check the credentials for login from the persistence layer.

8.1. The Custom UserDetailsService

We’ll start with the custom user details service implementation:

@Service
@Transactional
public class MyUserDetailsService implements UserDetailsService {
 
    @Autowired
    private UserRepository userRepository;
    
    public UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String email) throws UsernameNotFoundException {
        User user = userRepository.findByEmail(email);
        if (user == null) {
            throw new UsernameNotFoundException("No user found with username: " + email);
        }
        boolean enabled = true;
        boolean accountNonExpired = true;
        boolean credentialsNonExpired = true;
        boolean accountNonLocked = true;
        
        return new org.springframework.security.core.userdetails.User(
          user.getEmail(), user.getPassword(), enabled, accountNonExpired,
          credentialsNonExpired, accountNonLocked, getAuthorities(user.getRoles()));
    }
    
    private static List<GrantedAuthority> getAuthorities (List<String> roles) {
        List<GrantedAuthority> authorities = new ArrayList<>();
        for (String role : roles) {
            authorities.add(new SimpleGrantedAuthority(role));
        }
        return authorities;
    }
}

8.2. Enable the New Authentication Provider

To enable the new user service in the Spring Security configuration, we’ll simply need to add a reference to the UserDetailsService inside the authentication-manager element, and add the UserDetailsService bean:

Example 8.2. The Authentication Manager and the UserDetailsService

<authentication-manager>
    <authentication-provider user-service-ref="userDetailsService" />
</authentication-manager>
 
<beans:bean id="userDetailsService" class="com.baeldung.security.MyUserDetailsService" />

Another option is via Java configuration:

@Autowired
private MyUserDetailsService userDetailsService;

@Override
protected void configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
    auth.userDetailsService(userDetailsService);
}

9. Conclusion

In this article, we demonstrated a complete and almost production-ready registration process implemented with Spring Security and Spring MVC. Next, we’ll discuss the process of activating the newly registered account by verifying the email of the new user.

The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.

Registration – Activate a New Account by Email

« Previous

Spring Security Registration Series

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Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.

Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.

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To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, visit the documentation page.

You can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.