react.js application showing 404 not found in nginx server
The answers given here are correct. But, I was struggling with this when trying to deploy my React
Application in a docker container. The problem was on, how to change the nginx
configs inside a docker container.
Step 1: Prepare your Dockerfile
# Stage 1
FROM node:8 as react-build
WORKDIR /app
COPY . ./
RUN yarn
RUN yarn build
# Stage 2 - the production environment
FROM nginx:alpine
COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
COPY --from=react-build /app/build /usr/share/nginx/html
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"]
See line with command: COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
. Here, we are telling Docker to copy the nginx.conf
file from the docker host, to the docker container.
Step 2: Have a nginx.conf
file in your application root folder
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost;
location / {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm;
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html;
location = /50x.html {
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
}
}
Step 3: Now build the docker image and run it
$ docker build . -t react-docker
This should build your docker image successfully. To check that, run
$ docker images
Now run
$ docker run -p 8000:80 react-docker
and navigate to http://localhost:8000
This was inspired by this blog.
When your react.js
app loads, the routes are handled on the frontend by the react-router
. Say for example you are at http://a.com
. Then on the page you navigate to http://a.com/b
. This route change is handled in the browser itself. Now when you refresh or open the url http://a.com/b
in the a new tab, the request goes to your nginx
where the particular route does not exist and hence you get 404.
To avoid this, you need to load the root file(usually index.html) for all non matching routes so that nginx
sends the file and the route is then handled by your react app on the browser. To do this you have to make the below change in your nginx.conf
or sites-enabled
appropiately
location / {
try_files $uri /index.html;
}
This tells nginx
to look for the specified $uri
, if it cannot find one then it send index.html
back to the browser. (See https://serverfault.com/questions/329592/how-does-try-files-work for more details)
For me the solution was:
location / {
root /var/www/myapp/build;
index index.html;
try_files $uri /index.html$is_args$args =404;
}