title: Spring Boot Whitelabel Error Page almost everywhere
body: <p>Facing some difficulties trying to run Spring Boot to work with JSP pages. I know the limitations provided in documentation, so made everything according to the rules. However, can't find a problem.</p>
  
  <p>I'll try to provide as much information as possible.</p>
  
  <p>Wanted to start using Spring Boot. I'm using:</p>
  
  <p>IntelliJ IDEA, Maven, Maven Spring Boot Plugin, Embedded Tomcat. <a href="https://github.com/zdiyax/demo11" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Link</a> to the project sample.</p>
  
  <p>The REST controller works fine, but when I try to link jsp to the common controller, I 100% end up with Whitelabel error page, stating 404. </p>
  
  <p>Moving files from <code>WEB-INF</code> to <code>resources/static</code> doesn't help.</p>
  
  <p>The problem is even when I'm trying to run the simplest quick-start Spring Boot projects, I'm facing exceptions. <a href="https://gist.github.com/zdiyax/eb463b7bbb73a3ea16e8e23b9cf3f9f3" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Here</a>'s exception log when I tried to load the example from mkyong site.</p>
  
  <p>I tried to manage maven dependencies manually, as I browsed through some "potential" solutions and found that it could be jar conflict. I even tried to launch the project on a completely fresh operational system - that's the level of my despair.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Any guidance will be accepted as a divine ambrosia.</strong></p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>When trying to run the project again using <code>mvn spring-boot</code> after adding <code>javax.servlet-api</code> in dependencies got the following error. Log:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-
  maven-plugin:1.4.5.RELEASE:run (default-cli) on project demo: An 
  exception occurred while running. null: InvocationTargetException: 
  Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedServletContainerExceptio
  n: Unable to start embedded Tomcat: Failed to start component 
  [StandardServer[-1]]: Failed to start component [StandardService[Tomcat]]: 
  Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Tomcat]]: A child container 
  failed during start -&gt; [Help 1]
  [ERROR] 
  [ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with 
  the -
  e switch.
  [ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging.
  [ERROR] 
  [ERROR] For more information about the errors and possible solutions, 
  please read the following articles:
  [ERROR] [Help 1] 
  http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAVEN/MojoExecutionException
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong></p>
  
  <p>Using suggestion of @Piotr Gwiazda, tried the same but with Thymeleaf instead of JSP. Worked. However, I would like to know why JSP did not.</p>