Spring-Security: Different AuthenticationEntryPoint for API vs webpage

This is just a real quick post, on a little bit of Spring that I came across today. It's a very simple thing, but, in my opinion, beautiful in it's simplicity.

I found myself working on some Spring-Security stuff, and an app where I needed to define my AuthenticationEntryPoint (I am in the process of adding the security stuff, so this is not done yet).  Simple enough - normally in config you can just add it to the exception handling setup. However, this time I wanted to define two different entry points: one for when a user attempts to access an API (JSON) and one for normal site pages.

It's not unusual to have an API baked into an app (maybe under /api/** etc), and the ideal behaviour would be to return an appropriate HTTP Status code for the API (401) plus a JSON payload, and for a logged in web page the user would be bounced to the login page before continuing.


Having dealt with this split for error handling, controller routing and security elsewhere, I assumed I would have to implement a custom AuthenticationEntryPoint, chuck in a fer IF statements checking the logged in user and requested URL and either redirect or respond with the status appropriately. However, Spring has us covered with its DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint - which is what it sounds like, and super simple to use.  Probably best demonstrated with the code (because it's just that simple!)

@Override protected void configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
//normal config stuff etc..
//Setup entry point (e.g. where should a user be sent if accessing logged in only URL whilst not logged in)
http.exceptionHandling().authenticationEntryPoint( delegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint() )
}
@Bean public DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint delegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint(){
DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint entryPoint = new DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint( [ (new AntPathRequestMatcher( "/api/**" ))) : new HttpStatusEntryPoint( HttpStatus.UNAUTHORIZED ) ] )
entryPoint.defaultEntryPoint = new LoginUrlAuthenticationEntryPoint( "/" )
entryPoint
}
In our normal configure method we just set the entrypoint as usual. But in the DelegatingAuthenticationEntryPoint we simply initialise it with a map of RequestMatcher: AuthenticationEntryPoint (defined in Groovy above, so we have nice Map definition etc - would be slightly more verbose in Java)  - The RequestMatcher can be any implementation you like, but of course simple path matchers will probably work fine; For the AuthenticationEntryPoint there are also lots of really nice Spring implementations - including the two used in the example above, which perfectly provide what I need.


This genuinely elicited an "awww yeah" from me.

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