I am running a react app locally on apache2 server. It gives error URL not found on this server

Question

This is a simple react memory game app which i'm trying to run on apache. The app runs fine but when i copy the invite link produced and paste it in a newtab it gives error saying "'the requested url was not found on this server". It runs fine when i run it using "npm start" from the terminal but not on apache. This is my first day with apache so bear with me if the question is silly

Answer 1

Have you configured a reverse proxy in your Apache server? Because this is required for Apache to know how to handle URLs dynamically generated by React.

Example (from this answer):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName yourdomain.com
    ProxyPreserveHost on
    ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
</VirtualHost>

If you don't want to meddle with your Apache setup your only option is to use a HashRouter component, so all URLs will be preceeded by a #, this way your application's entrypoint is always its base URL and the routing in decided by React from the hash paremeter.

Examples:

<HashRouter
  basename={optionalString}
  getUserConfirmation={optionalFunc}
  hashType={optionalString}
>
  <App />
</HashRouter>

<HashRouter basename="/calendar"/>
<Link to="/today"/> // renders <a href="#/calendar/today">