Angular: $locationProvider.html5Mode(true) routing issue - angularjs

Question

I want to remove the # from my URLs, so I have the code below:
angular.module('building')
.config(['$stateProvider', '$locationProvider',
function ($stateProvider, $locationProvider) {
// Turn on #-less links.
$locationProvider.html5Mode(true);
$stateProvider
.state('building', {
url:'/building',
templateUrl: 'app/modules/building/building.html',
controller: 'BuildingQuery',
controllerAs: 'vm'
})
}]);
And I have <base href="/"> in my index.html file.
And the code works...sort of.
If I enter a link like this...
http://127.0.0.1:4000/#/building
Then the browser redirects that URL to...
http://127.0.0.1:4000/building
and loads the page.
However, if I enter this url...
http://127.0.0.1:4000/building
then...
Cannot GET /building
Because the # URLs redirect properly, I know $locationProvider.html5Mode(true); is doing something.
Any ideas? It might be useful to know that I'm using angm to generate the modules.

Answer 1

From the Angular docs:
Using [html5mode] requires URL rewriting on server side, basically you
have to rewrite all your links to entry point of your application
(e.g. index.html). Requiring a <base> tag is also important for this
case, as it allows Angular to differentiate between the part of the
url that is the application base and the path that should be handled
by the application.
I.e. you need to tell your server to rewrite any requests to /building to /index.html.

Answer 2

evsheino pointed me in the right direction. There's nothing wrong with my code, it was the server configuration causing problems. All I had to do was add the following to my gruntfile.js
middleware: function (connect, options) {
var optBase = (typeof options.base === 'string') ? [options.base] : options.base;
return [require('connect-modrewrite')(['!(\\..+)$ / [L]'])].concat(
optBase.map(function(path){ return connect.static(path); }));
},
keepalive: true,
port: 4000,
base: '.',
hostname: 'localhost',
debug: true,
livereload: true,
open: true
}
}
},
Full explanation can be found here: http://jjt.io/2013/11/16/angular-html5mode-using-yeoman-generator-angular/
EDIT: this was for connect