Implement 'logout' functionality in Spring Boot

Question

To get a basic security feature working, I added the following starter package to my pom.xml

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>

And added following two properties to application.properties:

security.user.name=guest
security.user.password=tiger

Now when I hit my homepage, I get the login box and login works as expected.

Now I want to implement the ‘logout’ feature. When the user clicks on a link, he/she gets logged out. I noticed that the login doesn’t add any cookie in my browser. I am assuming Spring Security creates an HttpSession object for the user. Is that true? Do I need to ‘invalidate’ this session and redirect the user to some other page? What’s the best way to implement the ‘logout’ feature in a Spring Boot based application?

Answer 1

Late is better than never. Spring Boot defaults lots of security components for you, including the CSRF protection. One of the things that does is force POST logout, see here: http://docs.spring.io/spring-security/site/docs/3.2.4.RELEASE/reference/htmlsingle/#csrf-logout

As this suggests you can override this, using something along the lines of:

http.authorizeRequests()
.antMatchers("/admin/**").hasRole("ADMIN")                                      
.anyRequest().fullyAuthenticated()
.and()
.formLogin().loginPage("/login").failureUrl("/login?error").permitAll()
.and()
.logout().logoutRequestMatcher(new AntPathRequestMatcher("/logout")).logoutSuccessUrl("/login");

The last line is the important one.