Web Page with Thymeleaf and Spring Boot

byTech Blogger •August 10, 2025

0

Creating Your First “Hello World” Web Page with Thymeleaf and Spring Boot

Thymeleaf is a powerful template engine that integrates seamlessly with Spring Boot to help you build dynamic web applications. Let’s walk through, step by step, how to create a simple web page that displays a static message using Thymeleaf, with a Spring Boot controller that serves this page—aka the classic “Hello World” example.

1. Project Setup

You’ll need:

Java (version 8+)
Maven or Gradle
Spring Boot (with the Thymeleaf starter)

Quick start with Spring Initializr:

Go to https://start.spring.io (or use your IDE's Spring initializer)
Choose Maven/Gradle, Java version, and add dependencies: Spring Web
and Thymeleaf
Generate and unzip your new project folder

2. Add Thymeleaf Template

Create a folder named templates
under src/main/resources
. Inside it, add a file named greeting.html
:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org">
<head>
    <title>Hello Thymeleaf</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1 th:text="'Hello, Thymeleaf World!'">Hello fallback</h1>
</body>
</html>

After your </html>
tag, you may add a <br>
if you want a blank line after the rendered content, but that isn't necessary for this example.

3. Write the Spring Controller

Create a controller class in src/main/java/com/example/demo
(or your package):

package com.example.demo;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;

@Controller
public class GreetingController {

    @GetMapping("/greet")
    public String sayHello() {
        // Return the name of the Thymeleaf template (without .html)
        return "greeting";
    }
}

4. Run the Application

Open a terminal in your project directory.

If using Maven, run:
```
./mvnw spring-boot:run
```
If using Gradle, run:
```
./gradlew bootRun
```

Open your browser and navigate to: http://localhost:8080/greet

You should see:

Hello, Thymeleaf World!

5. How It Works

The controller method /greet
returns the Thymeleaf view named "greeting"
.
Thymeleaf, integrated in Spring Boot, automatically resolves the greeting.html
template in /resources/templates/
.
The static message is set using th:text
, but you could easily swap in a dynamic value from the backend.

6. Making the Message Dynamic (Optional)

Controller:

@GetMapping("/greet")
public String sayHello(Model model) {
    model.addAttribute("message", "Hello, Dynamic Thymeleaf!");
    return "greeting";
}

Template:

<h1 th:text="${message}">Hello fallback</h1>

7. Summary

This “Hello World” project demonstrates how easy it is to wire up a Spring Boot controller to serve a Thymeleaf HTML template with just a few lines of code. You can now build on this foundation to create dynamic, data-driven web pages and rich user interfaces.