React App not starting in azure app service

Go to Azure Configuration>General Settings

• If your build folder is at the root of the project

Start up command: pm2 serve /home/site/wwwroot --no-daemon --spa

• If your build folder is inside your client folder, just add the path

Start up command: pm2 serve /home/site/wwwroot/client/build --no-daemon --spa

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Note:

Make sure your using Azure App Service linux server.

I added --spa at the end to fix the issue of react-router redirect, Using --spa will automatically redirect all queries to the index.html and then react-router will do its magic.

If you deployed to a Node Linux Web App the default document would be hostingstart.html located in /home/site/wwwroot/.

According to this:

When you create a Node.js app, by default, it's going to use hostingstart.html as the default document unless you configure it to look for a different file. You can use a JavaScript file to configure your default document. Create a file called index.js in the root folder of your site

So go to your ssh terminal, navigate to /home/site/wwwroot. Create index.js there with the following code:

var express = require('express');
var server = express();
var options = {
index: 'index.html'
};
server.use('/', express.static('/home/site/wwwroot', options));
server.listen(process.env.PORT);

NOTE: Be sure to run npm install --save express also in this folder else your app service will crash on startup

Restart, it will configure index.html as the default document for your app.

You don't need to install express and configure index.js as mentioned in other answers since that needs config change and not sure whether app scaling event will retain those installations in new instance.

Easy way is to use pm2 since that is already part of stack. Pass the below startup command for the app

pm2 serve /home/site/wwwroot --no-daemon

Once we restart, it should pick the pages from the docroot (/home/site/wwwroot)

add this command in your azure dashboard > Configuration > Startup Command

pm2 serve /home/site/wwwroot --no-daemon

and restart your server. This fixed it for me!