Remove default favicon

[vpavic]

The default favicon served by Spring Boot could be classified as information leakage, in a similar manner like Server HTTP header (see #4730) and exception error attribute (see #7872) were.

I'd consider removing the default favicon as applications that don't provide custom favicon will inevitably leak info about being powered by Spring Boot.

[wilkinsona]

This is quite tempting. While we have a configuration property (spring.mvc.favicon.enabled), it's enabled by default. The docs also do not seem to mention that a default favicon will be served so some people may not be aware of the out-of-the-box behaviour.

If an application developer cares about the favicon they will provide their own. If they don't care about it I doubt there's much difference to them between serving a default icon and serving nothing.

[wilkinsona]

Another benefit of removing the default favicon is that we could then also remove the spring.mvc.favicon.enabled property. It's a benefit as the property is confusing. Setting it to false does not, as the property's name might suggest, disable serving of a favicon.ico completely. It only disables serving a favicon.ico from the root of the classpath. A favicon.ico that's placed in one of the static resource locations will still be served.

[wilkinsona]

We've decided to remove the default favicon.ico file, the resource handler configuration, and the property. Users who were placing a custom favicon.ico in the root of the classpath should move it to a static resource location or configure their own resource mapping.

[patkovskyi]

What's the correct way to:

1. Return 404 on /favicon.ico requests
2. Return 200 with empty body on /favicon.ico requests

in Spring Boot 2.2.0+?

Note: I have spring.resources.add-mappings=false

[wilkinsona]

@patkovskyi You should get a 404 by default if there are no mappings configured for /favicon.ico. To return a 200 with an empty body, you'd have to set up a mapping somehow, for example with a @ResponseBody-annotated @GetMapping that returns null.

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[wilkinsona]

@hanryusan That’s unrelated to this issue as, with or without a default favicon, the location will change if you configure a context path. In that case you should link to the favicon.