When I refresh my website I get a 404. This is with Angular2 and firebase

Question

When I refresh my website I get a 404. This is with Angular2, typescript and firebase.

I've deployed to firebaseapp with my Angular2 app.

Routes seem to change fine but when I refresh the browser it redirects me to 404 page.

When I refresh locally this doesn't happen.

Am I missing any route settings or Firebase settings?

This is my firebase.json file:

 {
   "firebase": "test",
   "public": "src",
   "ignore": [
     "firebase.json",
     "**/.*",
     "**/node_modules/**"
   ]
 }

Answer 1

For Firebase Hosting the documentation on redirects and rewrites is here: https://www.firebase.com/docs/hosting/guide/url-redirects-rewrites.html

From there:

Use a rewrite when you want to show the same content for multiple URLs. Rewrites are particularly useful with pattern matching, as you can accept any URL that matches the pattern and let the client-side code decide what to display.

You're likely looking for the first rewrite sample on that page:

"rewrites": [ {
  "source": "**",
  "destination": "/index.html"
} ]

This is an instruction for the web server to serve /index.html for any incoming request, no matter what the path is.

Answer 2

Expanding on the accepted answer I wanted to show that the rewrites rules go inside of the hosting rules. in the firebase.json

"hosting": {
  "rewrites": [ {
    "source": "**",
    "destination": "/index.html"
   } ]
}

Firebase also has an updated docs page where the above example is from.

Also, I was thrown off by the hash (#) question around this. I found that doesn't apply to the new Angular. Making these small changes in the firebase.json, rebuilding, publishing to firebase, and then doing a refresh page with clear-cache immediately resolved my 404 issue with no workarounds required for hashes in the URL.

Answer 3

I think that you use the default mode of Angular2 routing (i.e. HTML5LocationStrategy). In this case, you need some configuration on your webserver to make load the index.html (your entry point file) for each URLs corresponding to each routes.

If you want to switch to the HashBang approach, you need to use this configuration:

import {bootstrap} from 'angular2/platform/browser';
import {provide} from 'angular2/core';
import {ROUTER_PROVIDERS} from 'angular2/router';
import {LocationStrategy, Location, HashLocationStrategy } from 'angular2/router'; 

import {MyApp} from './myapp';

bootstrap(MyApp, [
  ROUTER_PROVIDERS,
  provide(LocationStrategy, {useClass: HashLocationStrategy}
]);

In this case, when you refresh the page, it will be displayed again.

Hope it helps you, Thierry