Base URL Discrepancy Between Localhost and Deployed - create-react-app - reactjs

Question

I am building a web application from the ASP.Net Core React template, whose "ClientApp" React portion appears to be a 'create-react-app' project. When I deploy the app to IIS, it gets hosted in a subfolder from the root, i.e. http://myserver.com/SubApp. Because of this, I have changed the "homepage" value in package.json to http://myserver.com/SubApp.
What I am now experiencing is that when I am making fetch calls in my javascript code locally, if I use fetch('/myendpoint'), the the url requested locally is https://localhost:44315/myendpoint (which works), but when deployed, this url becomes http://myserver.com/myendpoint, which does not work.
Conversely, when I make the endpont fetch('myendpoint') (no leading slash), the server requests the correct URL http://myserver.com/SubApp/myendpoint but localhost fetches the incorrect URL, https://localhost:44315/SubApp/myendpoint.
I understand that the leading slash makes the request from the root, but the root appears to be different in localhost vs. on the server.
For local debugging purposes, I tried setting a proxy in package.json to https://localhost:44315 so that hopefully fetch('myendpoint') (no leading slash) would work in my local environment, but when I try this, chrome prompts me to sign in repeatedly without ever successfully making the request.
I feel like I am almost there, but I must be missing something. How can I configure my package.json (or other project configuration) to make the fetch commands succeed on both localhost and my server, without doing something hacky like checking the URL in the javascript code before every fetch?

Answer 1

What you need is Proxying API Requests in Development.
It easily allows you to call any endpoint in development and forward it to your backend or other location without CORS issues or your problem of mismatched endpoints.
You will have to use the manual configuration option, since the default proxy setup only helps with host/port forwarding.
Install http-proxy-middleware as a dev dependency:
$ npm -i http-proxy-middleware --save-dev
Following the guide linked above, you can use this configuration:
const { createProxyMiddleware } = require('http-proxy-middleware');
module.exports = function(app) {
app.use(
'/SubApp/*',
createProxyMiddleware({
target: 'localhost://44315', // or anything else, point to your dev backend
pathRewrite: {
'^/SubApp': '/', // remove base path
},
})
);
};
You can then fetch with the /SubApp part in the request which will be removed in developement. You can use other configurations to achieve this, this is one example.

Answer 2

I had this same experience as well and found that setting the homepage value in the package.json is a dead end. What you want to do is make use of the PUBLIC_URL environment variable to set a full absolute url in your .env . There may be a way to use relative urls, but there were some edge cases that just made it cleaner to use an absolute URL.
When you set this environment variable you want to make use of it in the following places:
Your Routes (if you use react router)
The path should be prefixed by process.env.PUBLIC_URL
Your internal links should also be prefixed by the env var.