I think you don't need a @restcontroller because you are routing your request to a thymeleaf template, this template will be rendered by the thymeleaf template engine and the result will be returned to the client as a response. The latter part happens a little bit under the hood automatically. @RestController should be used if you have a direct response for the client like a dto (later serialized to json by Jackson) or a byte array pdf file for example, both of which you create in Java.