How to setup a webpack dev server using both historyApiFallback and proxying remote api requests?

Question

I have a react application which uses react-router, so it's making use of HTML5 history API, I've tried historyApiFallback set to true to serve 404 paths serving the same index.html instead of returning the HTTP response.

That single page application does some requests to a remote API server, that's why I also need to proxy some requests to the express server I'm also running while developing. Web react application is served on port 3000 and API runs on port 3001.

So I've tried:

devServer:{
    contentBase: 'src/www',  //Relative directory for base of server
    devtool: 'eval',
    hot: true,        //Live-reload
    inline: true,
    port: 3000,        //Port Number
    host: 'localhost', //Change to '0.0.0.0' for external facing server
    historyApiFallback: true,
    proxy: {
      '^\/users|sitters|bookings': {
        target: 'http://127.0.0.1:3001',
        rewrite: function(req) {
          req.url = req.url.replace(/^\/api/, '');
        }
      }
    }
  },
  devtool: 'eval',
  output: {
    path: buildPath,    //Path of output file
    filename: 'app.js'
  },

So I what I want is hitting the remote api server if the request's path starts with either /users or /sitters or /bookings but go for historyApiFallback (serve index.html) otherwise.

Of course right now historyApiFallback works always serving the HTML file but I'd also need the proxy to be working.

Answer 1

Disclaimer. This answer might be outdated

In Express middleware stack order matters.

Proxy should be set up at webpack config first than historyApiFallback, this is how it should look like:

  devServer:{
    contentBase: 'src/www',  //Relative directory for base of server
    devtool: 'eval',
    hot: true,        //Live-reload
    inline: true,
    port: 3000,        //Port Number
    host: 'localhost', //Change to '0.0.0.0' for external facing server
    proxy: {
      '^\/users|sitters|bookings': {
        target: 'http://127.0.0.1:3001',
        rewrite: function(req) {
          req.url = req.url.replace(/^\/api/, '');
        }
      }
    },
    historyApiFallback: true
  },

So of course proxy can be changed to any pattern or regex as an application needs it. In my case that's what I needed.