Deploying React with Express with route integrity

Background

As you may or may not know React often uses routing through the browser history API

A few of the common libraries that you might encounter would be:

• React Router DOM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-router-dom
• Wouter: https://www.npmjs.com/package/wouter (personal favorite)

These libraries will let you define routes and which components are being rendered.

Quick Example:

<Route path="/about"><AboutPage/></Route>
<Route path="/user/:id">
    {params => <UserPage id={params.id} />}
</Route>

Running this in dev mode will work fine.

---

Issue

If you build the react app and try to host it with express you'll notice we run in an issue:

import * as express from 'express'
const app = express()
app.use(express.static(configuration.buildDirectory));
app.listen(8080, () => {
    console.log(`Server started on port 8080`);
});

If you navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080 you'll see your react app.

However if you navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080/about

You will receive an error:

Can't GET /about

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Solving the Issue

Our issue comes from the fact that express will only allow the route '/' to be used.

The idea is that we want to preserve the routes but still display our built index.html

For this we can add the following statement:

app.all('*', (req, res) => {
    res.sendFile(path.join(configuration.buildDirectory, '/index.html'), (err) => {
        if (err) {
            res.status(500).send(err)
        }
    })
});

This means that for every route we will render the index.html however since we are not redirecting we will preserve the URL scheme.

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