This short tutorial will show you how to build a basic login form using Spring Boot, Spring Security, and Thymeleaf.

Hello Java developers! If you are developing Spring boot-based applications, Spring Security is the de facto standard for securing your Spring-based applications.

In this short tutorial, we'll be looking at building a basic login form using Spring Boot, Spring Security, and Thymeleaf.

First, let's briefly cover some project files that are of less interest:

• *Application.java* contains our main method and the @SpringBootApplication annotation. The standard way to start a spring boot application.
• A CSS stylesheet is located under src/main/resources/static/css/ to make the demo pretty
• Some Thymeleaf HTML templates are found under src/main/resources/ for demo purposes also
• Finally, an *application.properties* file is located under src/main/resources where we can pass configuration parameters to our spring boot application. A complete list of configuration options can be found here

Dependencies

As with all Spring boot applications, there are many 'Starter' libraries that make it easy to add jars to your classpath:

• spring-boot-starter-parent — brings in all the required spring dependencies and manages their versions
• spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf — adds thymeleaf-spring5 and thymeleaf-extras-java8time dependencies (more on thymeleaf)
• spring-boot-starter-security — adds spring-security-config, spring-security-web, and spring-aop dependencies
• spring-boot-starter-test — adds spring-boot-test, junit, hamcrest and mockito
• spring-security-test — adds the ability to mock user and user roles