Serve: Serving a single page application behaves unexpectedly

Created on 23 Sep 2018 · 5Comments · Source: vercel/serve

Hi there!

We have some Create React App users in https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/issues/4680 using serve to host their production websites.

They are experiencing different behavior between our development server and serve which seems to be a bug, so I figured I'd post here.

Generally, we serve any file matching something on the filesystem. We fall back to index.html when nothing has matched (there's a few other rules on when to proxy, but they're not important for this example).

Serve appears to have the same behavior, but not in all cases. There appears to be a rule overriding the favoring of the filesystem.

Here's a demo of the behavior (humans.txt routes correctly but page2.html is transformed into page2):

Is this expected, or does it seem like a bug? Thanks!

Source

Timer

Most helpful comment

Seems related to: https://github.com/zeit/serve-handler#cleanurls-booleanarray

I was able to access .html files after adding a serve.json file to my public folder with cleanUrls: false

laran on 16 Oct 2018

👍4 🎉1

All 5 comments

same issue here, anything that is present on the filesystem is being redirected instead of serving it

gugurete on 27 Sep 2018

Is this a regression btw? Or did it always work this way?

gaearon on 27 Sep 2018

+1 same issue here. Makes it impossible to serve .html files.

laran on 16 Oct 2018

👍1

Seems related to: https://github.com/zeit/serve-handler#cleanurls-booleanarray

I was able to access .html files after adding a serve.json file to my public folder with cleanUrls: false

laran on 16 Oct 2018

👍4 🎉1

I'm also following the Deployment guide for Create React App which lists serve as the first option (https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/deployment#static-server).

I've tried the cleanUrls config mentioned above by @laran in https://github.com/zeit/serve/issues/479#issuecomment-430312596 but that did not solve it for me.

When attempting to run the build with Serve, API proxying requests error out compared to running with react-app-rewired start. Unfortunately I don't have a simple MCVE to reproduce this outside of our app as I did not write the app code but I believe this would be the same case for any create-react-app using proxy (https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/proxying-api-requests-in-development). That said it's definitely possible that it can be done and I just haven't figured out the configuration.