React: Accessing a page outside React app, inside public folder - reactjs

I have a React application created by create-react-app. The app works fine, but I have run into a problem
I need to test som ad things on a plain html site, no additional React code. The problem I have is that the ads.txt tags need to be crawled by Google, which can take up to 24 hours on a new page/URL, time that I don't really have.
So I did the following. In my repo under /public folder I added a folder /ad-test with an index.html inside. When I serve it locally using npm start and go to http://localhost:3000/ad-test, it works fine.
Great, I thought and deployed it to the production environment, but now when I try to go to http://[my-site]/ad-test or http://[my-site]/yo-test/index.html it does not work (I get the React 404 site that I created).
I looked here and if I understand correctly, it is not possible to do it the way that I tried since the build stage will not include the public folder. Am I correct in this?
Any idea how to solve this?
EDIT:
I have a good knowledge of React and React Router in general, the app already uses <Switch><Route ... /></Switch> with a catch-all route directing to Not Found Component and the bottom.
The problem I have is that we include some ad scripts from an ad provider. The ads are not displayed in the application (adblockers totally removed from browser etc.) and the provider thinks that we have made errors in the React code.
We don't think that we made any errors (the ads were displayed fine in our test environment but not in prod) and we have to prove that React is not to blame for the ads not showing.
To do this we created a static HTML file with all ads hardcoded, no React components or other things that might disturb. BUT, because of ads and Google crawlers and ads.txt, we need to have the static test page under the same domain as our main page/application.
This is why I ask if it is possible to somehow add a static HTML that can be reached from http://my.page/test-page.html without being "intercepted" by react router, i.e. it exists outside React but on the same server.

When you use react by create-react-app, it means you are building a single-page application.
What this means is that after running npm run build you will have a build folder with only one html file called index.html in that fold.
This index.html does not know and has no relationship with your added 'index.html' in ad-test folder.
If you want your ad-test html to be recognised by react, you need to make it a component of app.js and use react-router to give it a pathname.
It is very simple.
First, install react-router-dom;
Second, set up react-router-dom;refer to https://reacttraining.com/react-router/web/guides/quick-start
Third, give your add-test component a pathname.Your js code should look something like this:
<Route path='/ad-test' component={AdTest} />
IMPORTANT:
After you deploy your app, always remember you just built a single-page application.
You only have one html in your app.
Please make sure when you test your app after you deployed you must tell your service provider that no matter what pathname a user inputs in the address bar you always redirect it to the index.html
The build stage includes the public folder:
If you have a picture in the public folder, and this picture was imported to other components it will be shown after you run npm run build
Hope it helps.

Have you tried playing with webserver configurations? It is usually setup to redirect all traffic to index.html. Maybe exclude your static html path from redirection?
Place test-page.html in public folder like
public/path-to-static-html/test-page.html
Configure webserver for
directing all traffic to index.html EXCEPT /path-to-static-html which
will be directed to test-page.html.
For example, in case of Apache
you will be setting the DirectoryIndex directive.

Related

Routes don't work in production of react website

I have a question.
I created a react website and everything works perfectly on local development.
So if I go to localhost:8080/about I get on the about page.
When I build the website only an index.html gets made.
When I navigate the website from the index page, it all works, also the urls changes to /about when I go to the about page through the menu.
But when I go to www.website.com/about by typing in the address I get an error page.
Who can help me with this?
JayD
You need to setup your react router accordingly. Usually you need to add one extra file in your build files. Below is the tutorial on how to setup react router using fierbase and netlify. If you deploy somewhere else, please let me know. I can help you with that.
Firebase
Netlify

Cannot access pages with direct url after building project for deployment Spring and React

When running my spring app from my IDE and running the React app from within VSCode, everything worked perfectly. I used the build script to build my React project, and then put the output into my /static folder of Spring. Then I used mvn clean install to build the .jar file. After running the entire app from the .jar file, I can access my homepage with localhost:5000. I can also use my navbar links to access different parts of the website, like the Home page and the About page... But if I try to manually enter the url localhost:5000/about I get a 404 Not found error.. What am I doing wrong?
My guess is that your Spring (webmvc?) application is not configured to listen to different URLs other than /. And while it may seem as if the navbar successfully redirects to http://localhost:5000/about, in reality the single page application uses JavaScript client-side routing to change the URL in the browser, unload the currently rendered page, and load another page.
If you are indeed using Spring MVC, you could (among other options) modify your Spring static resource configuration, modify your #RequestMapping to listen to multiple endpoints, or use a ViewControllerRegistry.

Managing routes in reactjs app in production

How is routing handled in a built react app?
Specifically, in a development environment, we can simply hit <host>:<port>/<some-path> and the corresponding component is loaded, but once the app is built, we get a bunch of static files and single index.html file, which are then served by some server.
Now, upon hitting the url <server-host>:<server-port>, the app works as intended, but upon entering the path, say <server-host>:<server-port>/<component-path>, a 404 error is returned.
If there is, say a button, upon clicking which, the same /<component-path> is to be redirected, the app works, but then again upon refreshing that page, 404 error occurs.
How can this be solved? What is the correct way to serve such apps having many components at different routes?
approach1:(recommended)
In server config you should point all urls ( http://ipaddress:port/<* any url pattern>) to index.html of react-app . this is known as fallback-mechanism.
And when any request comes,index.html of React app will take care of that automatically because it is single page application.
approach2:
Use HashRouter in React app. So You will not have to configure anything.
Depending on which server you are deploying to, you should redirect all errors to the index.html look for the configuration maybe htaccess or for example if it an AWS S3 bucket you just specify the error page to the same index.html file that is served. Then you handle actual error in your code using a routing library like maybe react-router-dom to take care of actual error. Your failure is because in normal circumstances in a static host when you provide a URL like <server-port>/<component-path> the assumption the server makes is that there is a folder with name component-path in your root directory which has an index file from where to load and display but in the case of React single page application, everything is managed by the index.html. So every request has to pass via the index.html

How to deploy a react application on a static server

I have a react application build with create-react-app. Its using octoberCMS as the backend fetching data using Axios calls from the frontend. Till now I was developing keeping the build content of react inside a directory named 'react' in the root directory of octoberCMS installation. Hence the URL I was hitting was http://example.com/react/.
The problem is now I am done with the development phase and look forward to deployment. But I want my front-end to be served at http://example.com and backend to be served at http://example.com/backend (backend served as I want). How can I achieve this? I am fairly new to both frameworks.
I have tried keeping the build content along with the rest of the octoberCMS
First build your react app that will give you vendor.js[third party scripts] and your app.js[your actual app]
put them in to theme directory assets something
Then In Ocotber CMS make page with URL /:url? and paste your index.html content there.
it will be your root div and including js html, change path for js which points to the build js which you put in theme directory.
now what happens when anybody come to site
- we are serving same content as we do in dev build
- index.html with root tag and needed js
Now if use hit any other url like https://www.example.com/test/etc it also will be catch by /:url? (and all other requests) and home page served and our react app will work as we needed.
if any questions please comment.

Nginx 404 on page reload on Cloud Foundry

Problem:
I've deployed a React application to our internal cloud at my company. It works with Cloud Foundry. The app works really well, but there's one problem. Whenever I refresh the application and the URL isn't pointing to the root, for example myapp.ourcloud.com/my-route, I get a Error 404 from Nginx.
What I'm using:
The App is a simple React application. No special modules installed beside React Router V4. The Code is pretty simple, I'm using the BrowserRouter, as a child the application. There are only 3 components that ar simply routed with <Link To=.../> and <Route path={.../> ... as said, pretty basic.
What I've tried so far:
I have added a Staticfile in the root directory with pushstate: enabled as stated in the Cloud Foundry documentation.
I just found the answer by myself. I'll post it here for future users:
My manifest.yml file had the following content:
...
path: build/
...
You simply have to put the Staticfile inside the build/ folder from react and not in the project root. Also be careful, the Staticfile gets deleted everytime you build the project.
Serve index.html for all request and then the react router will manage all the routing.
If you however have endpoints or some backend routes you need to access, just make exception for these routes and serve index.html for everything else.

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