React-router and nginx

Question

I am transitioning my react app from webpack-dev-server to nginx.

When I go to the root url "localhost:8080/login" I simply get a 404 and in my nginx log I see that it is trying to get:

my-nginx-container | 2017/05/12 21:07:01 [error] 6#6: *11 open() "/wwwroot/login" failed (2: No such file or directory), client: 172.20.0.1, server: , request: "GET /login HTTP/1.1", host: "localhost:8080"
my-nginx-container | 172.20.0.1 - - [12/May/2017:21:07:01 +0000] "GET /login HTTP/1.1" 404 169 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.12; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0" "-"

Where should I look for a fix ?

My router bit in react looks like this:

render(

  <Provider store={store}>
    <MuiThemeProvider>
      <BrowserRouter history={history}>
        <div>
          Hello there p
          <Route path="/login" component={Login} />
          <App>

            <Route path="/albums" component={Albums}/>

            <Photos>
              <Route path="/photos" component={SearchPhotos}/>
            </Photos>
            <div></div>
            <Catalogs>
              <Route path="/catalogs/list" component={CatalogList}/>
              <Route path="/catalogs/new" component={NewCatalog}/>
              <Route path="/catalogs/:id/photos/" component={CatalogPhotos}/>
              <Route path="/catalogs/:id/photos/:photoId/card" component={PhotoCard}/>
            </Catalogs>
          </App>
        </div>
      </BrowserRouter>
    </MuiThemeProvider>
  </Provider>, app);

And my nginx file like this:

user  nginx;
worker_processes  1;

error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log warn;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;


events {
    worker_connections  1024;
}


http {
    include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    default_type  application/octet-stream;

    log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" '
                      '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                      '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

    access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log  main;

    sendfile        on;
    #tcp_nopush     on;

    keepalive_timeout  65;

    #gzip  on;

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;

    server {
        listen 8080;
        root /wwwroot;

        location / {
            root /wwwroot;
            index index.html;

            try_files $uri $uri/ /wwwroot/index.html;
        }


    }
}

EDIT:

I know that most of the setup works because when I go to localhost:8080 without being logged in I get the login page as well. this is not through a redirect to localhost:8080/login - it is some react code.

The parameters to try_files should be URIs and not pathnames. Try: try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; — Richard Smith
@RichardSmith OK... I saw it as the pathname to the index.html file. I have tried changing it to what you suggested - but getting the same result. ## /wwwroot/login" failed (2: No such file or directory) ## do you have other suggestions. I'll dive into it tonite... — martin
@martin have you been able to solve this yet? We are seeing the same thing, but already had the try_files line in there. — Billy Ferguson

Toby Toby · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-13T15:02:03

The location block in your nginx config should be:

location / {
  try_files $uri /index.html;
}

The problem is that requests to the index.html file work, but you're not currently telling nginx to forward other requests to the index.html file too.

React-router and nginx

12 Answers

If you are serving from a sub-directory (e.g. http://localhost:8080/jobs/):