Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

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.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat= Spring Boot)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

To learn more about Java features on Azure Container Apps, you can get started over on the documentation page.

And, you can also ask questions and leave feedback on the Azure Container Apps GitHub page.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat=Spring)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag=Microservices)
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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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

eBook – Guide Spring Cloud – NPI EA (cat=Spring Cloud)
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Let's get started with a Microservice Architecture with Spring Cloud:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Mockito – NPI EA (tag = Mockito)
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Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.

Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:

Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Reactive – NPI EA (cat=Reactive)
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Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
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Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Jackson – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Do JSON right with Jackson

Download the E-book

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=Http Client-Side)
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Get the most out of the Apache HTTP Client

Download the E-book

eBook – Maven – NPI EA (cat = Maven)
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Get Started with Apache Maven:

Download the E-book

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

eBook – RwS – NPI EA (cat=Spring MVC)
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Building a REST API with Spring?

Download the E-book

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=Jackson)
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Get started with Spring and Spring Boot, through the Learn Spring course:

>> LEARN SPRING
Course – RWSB – NPI EA (cat=REST)
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Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:

>> The New “REST With Spring Boot”

Course – LSS – NPI EA (cat=Spring Security)
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Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.

I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.

You can explore the course here:

>> Learn Spring Security

Course – All Access – NPI EA (cat= Spring)
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All Access is finally out, with all of my Spring courses. Learn JUnit is out as well, and Learn Maven is coming fast. And, of course, quite a bit more affordable. Finally.

>> GET THE COURSE
Course – LSD – NPI EA (tag=Spring Data JPA)
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Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.

Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – LambdaTest – NPI EA (cat=Testing)
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End-to-end testing is a very useful method to make sure that your application works as intended. This highlights issues in the overall functionality of the software, that the unit and integration test stages may miss.

Playwright is an easy-to-use, but powerful tool that automates end-to-end testing, and supports all modern browsers and platforms.

When coupled with LambdaTest (an AI-powered cloud-based test execution platform) it can be further scaled to run the Playwright scripts in parallel across 3000+ browser and device combinations:

>> Automated End-to-End Testing With Playwright

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (cat=Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – LSS – NPI (cat=Spring Security)
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If you're working on a Spring Security (and especially an OAuth) implementation, definitely have a look at the Learn Spring Security course:

>> LEARN SPRING SECURITY

1. Overview

This tutorial will explain how to set up, configure, and customize Basic Authentication with Spring. We’re going to build on top of the simple Spring MVC example, and secure the UI of the MVC application with the Basic Auth mechanism provided by Spring Security.

Further reading:

Spring Boot Security Auto-Configuration

A quick and practical guide to Spring Boot's default Spring Security configuration.

Spring Security Authentication Provider

How to Set Up a Custom Authentication Provider with Spring Security and the namespace configuration.

Spring Security Form Login

A Spring Login Example - How to Set Up a simple Login Form, a Basic Security XML Configuration and some more Advanced Configuration Techniques.

2. The Spring Security Configuration

We can configure Spring Security using Java config:

@Configuration
@EnableWebSecurity
public class CustomWebSecurityConfigurerAdapter {

    @Autowired private RestAuthenticationEntryPoint authenticationEntryPoint;

    @Autowired
    public void configureGlobal(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) throws Exception {
        auth
          .inMemoryAuthentication()
          .withUser("user1")
          .password(passwordEncoder().encode("user1Pass"))
          .authorities("ROLE_USER");
    }

    @Bean
    public SecurityFilterChain filterChain(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
        http.authorizeHttpRequests(expressionInterceptUrlRegistry ->
                        expressionInterceptUrlRegistry.requestMatchers("/securityNone").permitAll()
                                .anyRequest().authenticated())
            .httpBasic(httpSecurityHttpBasicConfigurer -> httpSecurityHttpBasicConfigurer.authenticationEntryPoint(authenticationEntryPoint));
        http.addFilterAfter(new CustomFilter(), BasicAuthenticationFilter.class);
        return http.build();
    }
    
    @Bean
    public PasswordEncoder passwordEncoder() {
        return new BCryptPasswordEncoder();
    }
}

Here we’re using the httpBasic() element to define Basic Authentication inside the SecurityFilterChain bean.

We could achieve the same result using XML as well:

<http pattern="/securityNone" security="none"/>
<http use-expressions="true">
    <intercept-url pattern="/**" access="isAuthenticated()" />
    <http-basic />
</http>

<authentication-manager>
    <authentication-provider>
        <user-service>
            <user name="user1" password="{noop}user1Pass" authorities="ROLE_USER" />
        </user-service>
    </authentication-provider>
</authentication-manager>

What’s relevant here is the <http-basic> element inside the main <http> element of the configuration. This is enough to enable Basic Authentication for the entire application. Since we’re not focusing on the Authentication Manager in this tutorial, we’ll use an in-memory manager with the user and password defined in plain text.

The web.xml of the web application enabling Spring Security has already been discussed in the Spring Logout tutorial.

3. Consuming the Secured Application

The curl command is our go-to tool for consuming the secured application.

First, let’s try to request the /homepage.html without providing any security credentials:

curl -i http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest-basic-auth/api/foos/1

We get back the expected 401 Unauthorized and the Authentication Challenge:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=E5A8D3C16B65A0A007CFAACAEEE6916B; Path=/spring-security-mvc-basic-auth/; HttpOnly
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Spring Security Application"
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 1061
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 15:14:08 GMT

Normally the browser would interpret this challenge and prompt us for credentials with a simple dialog, but since we’re using curl, this isn’t the case.

Now let’s request the same resource, the homepage, but provide the credentials to access it as well:

curl -i --user user1:user1Pass 
  http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest-basic-auth/api/foos/1

As a result, the response from the server is 200 OK along with a Cookie:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=301225C7AE7C74B0892887389996785D; Path=/spring-security-mvc-basic-auth/; HttpOnly
Content-Type: text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Length: 90
Date: Wed, 29 May 2013 15:19:38 GMT

From the browser, we can consume the application normally; the only difference is that a login page is no longer a hard requirement since all browsers support Basic Authentication, and use a dialog to prompt the user for credentials.

4. Further Configuration – the Entry Point

By default, the BasicAuthenticationEntryPoint provisioned by Spring Security returns a full page for a 401 Unauthorized response back to the client. This HTML representation of the error renders well in a browser. Conversely, it’s not well suited for other scenarios, such as a REST API where a json representation may be preferred.

The namespace is flexible enough for this new requirement as well.  To address this, the entry point can be overridden:

<http-basic entry-point-ref="myBasicAuthenticationEntryPoint" />

The new entry point is defined as a standard bean:

@Component
public class MyBasicAuthenticationEntryPoint extends BasicAuthenticationEntryPoint {

    @Override
    public void commence(
      HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, AuthenticationException authEx) 
      throws IOException, ServletException {
        response.addHeader("WWW-Authenticate", "Basic realm="" + getRealmName() + """);
        response.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_UNAUTHORIZED);
        PrintWriter writer = response.getWriter();
        writer.println("HTTP Status 401 - " + authEx.getMessage());
    }

    @Override
    public void afterPropertiesSet() throws Exception {
        setRealmName("Baeldung");
        super.afterPropertiesSet();
    }
}

By writing directly to the HTTP Response, we now have full control over the format of the response body.

5. The Maven Dependencies

The Maven dependencies for Spring Security have been discussed before in the Spring Security with Maven article. We will need both spring-security-web and spring-security-config available at runtime.

6. Conclusion

In this article, we secured an MVC application with Spring Security and Basic Authentication. We discussed the XML configuration, and we consumed the application with simple curl commands. Finally, we took control of the exact error message format, moving from the standard HTML error page to a custom text or JSON format.

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.

When the project runs locally, the sample HTML can be accessed at:

http://localhost:8080/spring-security-rest-basic-auth/api/foos/1.

Baeldung Pro – NPI EA (cat = Baeldung)
announcement - icon

Baeldung Pro comes with both absolutely No-Ads as well as finally with Dark Mode, for a clean learning experience:

>> Explore a clean Baeldung

Once the early-adopter seats are all used, the price will go up and stay at $33/year.

Partner – Microsoft – NPI EA (cat = Spring Boot)
announcement - icon

Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

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.

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (cat = Spring)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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

Partner – Orkes – NPI EA (tag = Microservices)
announcement - icon

Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.

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.

With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.

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

eBook – HTTP Client – NPI EA (cat=HTTP Client-Side)
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The Apache HTTP Client is a very robust library, suitable for both simple and advanced use cases when testing HTTP endpoints. Check out our guide covering basic request and response handling, as well as security, cookies, timeouts, and more:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Concurrency – NPI EA (cat=Java Concurrency)
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Handling concurrency in an application can be a tricky process with many potential pitfalls. A solid grasp of the fundamentals will go a long way to help minimize these issues.

Get started with understanding multi-threaded applications with our Java Concurrency guide:

>> Download the eBook

eBook – Java Streams – NPI EA (cat=Java Streams)
announcement - icon

Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.

But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.

To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:

>> Join Pro and download the eBook

eBook – Persistence – NPI EA (cat=Persistence)
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Working on getting your persistence layer right with Spring?

Explore the eBook

Course – LS – NPI EA (cat=REST)

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Get started with Spring Boot and with core Spring, through the Learn Spring course:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI EA (cat= Baeldung)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – Spring Sale 2025 – NPI (All)
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Yes, we're now running our Spring Sale. All Courses are 25% off until 26th May, 2025:

>> EXPLORE ACCESS NOW

Course – LSS – NPI (cat=Security/Spring Security)
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I just announced the new Learn Spring Security course, including the full material focused on the new OAuth2 stack in Spring Security:

>> CHECK OUT THE COURSE

Partner – Microsoft – NPI (cat=Spring)
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Azure Container Apps is a fully managed serverless container service that enables you to build and deploy modern, cloud-native Java applications and microservices at scale. It offers a simplified developer experience while providing the flexibility and portability of containers.

Of course, Azure Container Apps has really solid support for our ecosystem, from a number of build options, managed Java components, native metrics, dynamic logger, and quite a bit more.

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.

eBook Jackson – NPI EA – 3 (cat = Jackson)