Internationalization with spring boot. Default messages

Question

i want to provide the text on my page in a language the user understands. Since i don't speak every language on the world and i don't trust google transalte that much ;) i want to use a default language.

I thought I could just provide every language i know in a messages_en.properties or messages_de.properties and for every language i didn't provide like this the default messages.properties is used.

It turns out that this is not the case. The two explicitly provided languages do work as expected but if i try to visit my site when set my browsers language for example to polish, it shows german instead of english which is used in my messages.properties.

I didn't do any specific configuration to use internationalization. I just use the thymeleaf-starter and reference my messages by th:text="#{my.property}"

Do i have to configure anything to make messages.properties the default?

Answer 1

Okay i just figured out what the problem was.

There is a property spring.messages.fallback-to-system-locale which defaults to true. That's why the german messages were picked for a unknown language. When setting it to false it defaults to the message.properties.