react production build 404 not found

Question

Hello i need to deploy react app.

To achieve that i run : "npm run build"

after that in my vhost.conf i've added vhost

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName hello.local
DocumentRoot c:/wamp64/www/hello_world/build
<Directory  "c:/wamp64/www/hello_world/build">
             Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
             AllowOverride All
             Require all granted
</Directory>

i've also added to etc/hosts hello.local

of course i've enabled mod rewrite in httpd.conf

When i run hello.local/ main page of my react app display properly, but when i want to go to react-react route path hello.local/example i received 404 not found error. Please help what can it be ? It's problem with apache configuration or react-router has some mistake ? Regards

Answer 1

This is a common issue that comes up for SPA. In SPA, mostly the routing happens on client side. In your case, mostly react-router should be doing the job. Since the whole js is bundled as a single file and is served in index.html, you need to serve index.html for all paths that is non-existing in your server.

You have to add a config like this

RewriteEngine On  
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} -d
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

RewriteRule ^ /index.html [L]

So, if there is no matching path in your server, the index.html would get served. Then the javascript would execute and react-router(client side routing) will take over and display the correct component for the route.

This is true for most SPA, where the routing happens on client side.