"Why is my API returning HTML error pages?!" I stared at my console in disbelief. My React frontend was trying to parse JSON, but Spring Security was happily serving up a Whitelabel Error Page for failed authentication attempts. This took me 3 hours to fix. Let me show you how to make Spring Security play nice with modern frontends. 🎨✨
"My login endpoint is returning 403 Forbidden! But I configured it as .permitAll() in SecurityConfig! Why is the JwtFilter still blocking it?" I spent 2 hours debugging this. Turns out, I had a fundamental misunderstanding of how Spring Security works. The JwtFilter doesn't "skip" endpoints - it runs on EVERYTHING. Let me explain the magic. 🎩✨
"Is it safe to add password in LoginRequest? Can someone reach the user's request?" Great security question! The answer depends entirely on whether you're using HTTP or HTTPS. With HTTP, anyone on the network can see your password in plain text. With HTTPS, it's encrypted end-to-end. Let's understand the difference and how to secure your login.
"I just added spring-boot-starter-security to my pom.xml and now ALL my endpoints return 401 Unauthorized! I didn't write any security code - why is this happening?" This is Spring Security's "secure by default" philosophy at work. Let's understand why this design choice makes sense and how to configure it.
Want to implement JWT authentication in Spring Boot? You need three dependencies, not one. Here's why and what each one does.