In Spring Security, when authentication is failed, following predefined error messages will be displayed :

Spring display : Bad credentials

In this article, we show you how to override above error message and display your custom error message. For example,

Spring display : Bad credentials
You want override it with this message : Invalid username or password

Solution

Spring Security stored messages in “messages.properties” inside “spring-security-core.jar“, see figure below :

message.properties

To override it, find which key generate what error message in spring security message.properties file, and redefine it with your own properties file.

1. Override Key and Message

Create a new properties file, put it on project classpath, and override the Spring’s “key” with your custom error message. In this case, just override “AbstractUserDetailsAuthenticationProvider.badCredentials“.

File : mymessages.properties

AbstractUserDetailsAuthenticationProvider.badCredentials=Invalid username or password

2. Register ResourceBundleMessageSource

To load above properties file, define ResourceBundleMessageSource in Spring bean configuration file.

  <bean id="messageSource"
	class="org.springframework.context.support.ResourceBundleMessageSource">
	<property name="basenames">
	    <list>
		<value>mymessages</value>
	    </list>
	</property>
  </bean>

Now, when authentication is failed, it will display your custom error message “Invalid username or password“, instead of the default “Bad credentials“.

Note
With this trick, you can override any Spring Security messages easily.

Download Source Code

Download it – Spring-Security-Display-Custom-Error-Msg.zip (9 KB)
Note : You can find more similar articles at - Spring Security Tutorials
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