Preact-cli: URL with period doesn't work when using "npm start" (serve)

[mcilrain]

Works: https://cli-demo-next.preactjs.com/profile/john.txt

Doesn't work: http://127.0.0.1:8080/profile/john.txt

Error message: Cannot GET /profile/john.txt

Local is a fresh install of node and all the needed libraries.

[prateekbh]

hmmm https://cli-demo-next.preactjs.com is configured as a SPA, which means GET requests to all routes would be transferred to /. Something tells me that the same is not true for your local environment

[mcilrain]

Works fine without the period: http://127.0.0.1:8080/profile/john

I used npm run start to run it locally as instructed by the preact create command and the README.md file it generated, I also tried python3 -m http.server in the build directory after building with the same result.

In any case I need URLs with periods in them, while trying to diagnose the issue I noticed that cli-demo-next.preactjs.com supports them.

How do I configure my local environment to get the desired functionality?

[mcilrain]

Just realized that python3 -m http.server wouldn't work for any URL other than root, don't know why I expected otherwise.

Still, I don't see why npm run start wouldn't work, especially if it works for other non-root URLs.

Additionally, following a link containing a period from within the loaded site correctly changes the URL and loads the appropriate page, but upon refreshing it gives that error.

[prateekbh]

How do I configure my local environment to get the desired functionality?

A simple HTTP-server might not be able to do this. A more elaborate server can implement a catch-all handler and serve index.html to it.

Still, I don't see why npm run start wouldn't work, especially if it works for other non-root URLs.

npm run start would only work for root index.html and pre-rendered urls. Are you pre-rendering any routes?

any repo to reproduce this?

[mcilrain]

I am using the project that preact create default my-project creates with no modification.

I do not know if I am pre-rendering any routes, I have not changed any settings from their defaults.

[prateekbh]

Will check

[prateekbh]

I just checked, seems to be working fine

My setup for trying this out on local

1. use https://www.npmjs.com/package/http-server
2. rename index.html to 404.html inside build folder, so all requests can be directed to it

[developit]

Python's simple server doesn't work for Single Page Apps.

Currently we use serve, which treats any URL with a file extension as being a path on disk. Instead, we could switch to sirv-cli:

npx sirv-cli build -Dcs
# or
npm i -D sirv-cli && ./node_modules/.bin/sirv build -Dcs

Sirv maintains an in-memory file list and doesn't need to rely on URL patterns to trigger single-page routing fallbacks. It defaults to localhost:5000 --host foo --port 8080 to change. You can put this in an npm script, or run it from your teminal.

@prateekbh @ForsakenHarmony - thinking we should change the default template to use sirv (here).

[cristianbote]

Opened a PR against the default template (https://github.com/preactjs-templates/default/pull/39)

[ForsakenHarmony]

Should be fixed