Very important notes on spring boot https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/issues/8299 , if you want to pack your spring-boot into an executable jar with jsp, wherever you put your jsp insrc/main/META-INF/resources orsrc/main/webapp, it will not work. The correct way to pack your application is : pack your spring-boot app into war instead of jar, but you can still execute your war by “java -jar XXX.war”, and your jsp files can be placed in src/main/webapp