Hosting a React app with React Router on a static server - reactjs

Situation:
I'm building a React app with React Router.
It was generated from create-react-app.
I need to host it statically.
If I visit the home page first and then click around, everything works fine.
Problem:
When visiting a sub page directly such as https://www.example.com/path/page server returns 404 error because /path/page is not a valid directory on the server.
For as far as I can tell, the server is just serving up files statically, and I cannot change how the server is written (I know I could solve this problem by routing all accesses to the react app with some server code, but this is not an option).
How can I make all urls directly visitable by only changing code in my react app?

After some research, I figured out that what I needed was a static site generator.
There are a couple of options available that works with React.js
React Static
Gatsby
Next JS
Some useful articles on getting started:
For Gatsby: https://medium.com/codingthesmartway-com-blog/gatsby-static-site-generator-for-react-introduction-b9fce7df6b24
For React Static: https://medium.com/#tannerlinsley/%EF%B8%8F-introducing-react-static-a-progressive-static-site-framework-for-react-3470d2a51ebc

Related

is there any hostgator equivalent to netlify _redirect?

I made a website with React and I used react router for routing, my problem is:
When on a non route page the browser is refreshed, I got the hostgator standard 404 page.
I know why is that and I looking for a solution like at netlify.
At netlify I can use a file named _redericets and the problem is solved.

Gatsby client routes go to 404 in develoment environment

I am working on a gatsby hybrid app that has several client-only routes with dynamic server data.
Strangely when navigating to one of the client-only routes at I am getting the 404 page and the message that there is no page found.
Visiting the client-only URL directly, eg. mysite/auth/login works, and the issue only happens when using an internal Link component or navigate('/auth/login').
I am using the gatsby-plugin-create-client-paths setup
and Router component to handle the client-routing
I am have tried different approaches but couldn't figure out why I am being redirected to the 404 page.
The issue happens only on the inial page visit. Once the page has been loaded internal navigation works without errors and also only happens in development mode. The production build works just fine.
Any ideas what could cause this behavior??
I guess you are using reach router navigate.
If thats the case, try and use navigate from gatsby.
import { navigate } from 'gatsby'
Similar issue exists in the "simple-auth" example in Gatsby git repository. After initial startup by running yarn develop at background, the click on 'log in' will go to Gatsby development 404 page.
The reason behind this is this example, and quite a lot demo around blog spots use the "Link" from #reach/react, which normally doesn't handle SSG or static routing thing, but "Link" from gatsby knows very well how to handle these.
So, the fix is:
to replace // import { Link } from "#reach/router" with import { Link } from "gatsby".

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

Nextjs 404 error on reload/ refresh action

I'm using Nextjs for a front-end application and dotnet core 3.1 for the Web API. There are some pages that are static and other that are dynamic I followed the official documentation to achieve this. On development mode (local machine) everything works fine. Both static and dynamic routes are working properly and fetching data from the dontnet core Web API.
However, when publishing the Nextjs app following this steps:
yarn build
yarn export
An out folder is generated at the root of the project
The content of that folder is uploaded to the server
After, the deployed files are uploaded and when loging to the app, it redirects to the main page (until here is working OK), but as soon as I click on the reload page botton (Chrome) I am gettint the 404 error.
Looking at the console in the developer tools I got this:
I found this Stackoverflow link with same issue but there the answer is to use Express for server routing. In my case I am using dotnet core Web API for server requests. So, not sure how to do that.
Is there a way to fix this from the client side? Might be a configuration is missing?
The only thing I noticed while doing the export was a message saying: No "exportPathMap" found. Not sure if that would the the reason.
I had got similar issue in react when all of my pages after building and exporting had ".html" extensions. I solved it by the following code in next.config.js file.
next.config.js
module.exports = {
exportTrailingSlash: true,
}
Note: Do not work with the above code while in development. Use it just before building the project.
You can find the documentation link here: https://nextjs.org/docs/api-reference/next.config.js/exportPathMap#adding-a-trailing-slash.
UPDATE
The above code was for next.js v9.3.4 which I was using at that time. For newer versions below code should be used according to docs.
next.config.js
module.exports = {
trailingSlash: true,
}
it has been fixed update your nextjs package
npm install next#latest
based on the current version of Next js you have, visit here to see if there's any breaking change before updating what you have
I had a similar issue where after deploying the out folder created by next export all URL's would redirect me to the homepage. Everything was working fine during development and all URL's were accessible with next/link but in order to access pages with a URL I had to add a .html extension at the end of the URL.
Because I needed a quick workaround I added a useEffect block in the _app.tsx file for rerouting so that upon landing on the homepage it would act as if a Link component was clicked redirecting to the entered URL.
useEffect(()=>{
router.push(window.location.href)
},[])

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

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.

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