How to access HTML files **through a controller** in Spring boot without a template engine

This is a very simplistic answer to a simple issue, this is not meant to scale and does not take into account the entirety of your project

Please keep in mind this is not the norm in a business environment but it was really bothering me how I cannot get a simple HTML to populate from a controller without using a template engine. I got it to work with thymeleaf dependency but I wanted to just get it to work as bare bones as possible. I read a lot of posts with ViewResolver Config classes or things a like but nothing worked. It would conflict with the internal resolvers of Spring boot.

Simple answer is once spring boot is initialized...all your static files must be in resources/static/

Templates folder is specific to use for Thymeleaf, based on my findings and it wont work if you just put it in the resource folders.

With your files in resources/static/ you can access it by going to localhost:8080/yourfilename.html

But if you want to access it through a controller you create a controller with the following:

@Controller
public class IndexController {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String getIndex(){
        return " index.html";
    }
}

If you want to remove the .html in your return value then you must add the following to your application.properties file

spring.mvc.view.suffix=.html

Then you can use the following

@Controller
public class IndexController {

    @RequestMapping("/")
    public String getIndex(){
        return " index";
    }
}

Once again this is a simple research I did on my own just to get it to work.