Spring security - requestmatchers().permitall() not redirecting to the desired page

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Java

security

Spring

Hello everyone, I have a basic spring boot application that I want to implement basic security features on. I've added spring security, spring web and thymeleaf dependencies to my pom.xml file. I have the following codes.

HomeController class

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/account")
public class HomeController {
	
	@GetMapping("/home")
	public String home() {
		
		return "index";
	}
	
	@GetMapping("/register")
	public String register() {
		
		
		return "register";
	}

}

AppSecurityConfig class

@EnableWebSecurity
public class AppSecurityConfig  {
	
	@Bean
	public SecurityFilterChain configure(HttpSecurity http) throws Exception {
		
		http
			.authorizeHttpRequests()
			.requestMatchers("/login", "/register").permitAll() 
			.anyRequest().authenticated() 
			.requestMatchers("/account/**").hasAnyAuthority("USER") 
			.formLogin().and()
			.httpBasic();
			
		return http.build();	
		
	}
	
}

When I run the spring boot app and go to this url (localhost:8080/register) in my browser it's taking me to the spring default formLogin page which shouldn't be because I've used

.requestMatchers("/login", "/register").permitAll() 

to exclude "/login" and "/register" urls from any authentication. Please what I'm I missing ? I have a "register.html" file in my template directory of my spring boot application. Thanks in advance for any help.

What I have tried:

pom.xml dependencies

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-security</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.security</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-security-test</artifactId>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-devtools</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf</artifactId>
    </dependency>

</dependencies>