How to Centralise Exception Handling in Spring Boot for Cleaner APIs

As Spring Boot applications grow, scattering try-catch blocks across multiple controllers leads to repeated code, inconsistent error responses, and harder maintenance. A recommended approach is to define custom exception classes — such as ResourceNotFoundException and BusinessException — that express business errors without coupling service logic to HTTP responses. A standardised ErrorResponse object containing fields like timestamp, status, and message ensures API clients receive uniform error structures across all endpoints. Spring's @RestControllerAdvice annotation enables a single GlobalExceptionHandler class to intercept and handle these exceptions centrally. This pattern keeps controllers clean, separates business errors from system errors, and makes the overall application significantly easier to maintain and scale.