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
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
The problem comes when you are in a path for eg http:///some/path and you hit refresh you get a 404 error page. This extra line in the ngnix configuration could solve the issue.
This worked for me while using nginx to serve react:
Edit the location section of the nginx.conf(or can also be default.conf) file to be as below. The nginx.conf file is found somewhere in /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then redirect to index(angular) if no file found.
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
The full nginx.conf configuration will therefore be as below:
server {
listen 80 default_server;
server_name localhost;
root /usr/share/nginx/html;
index index.html index.htm;
location /{
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}
}