rewrite rules for apache 2 to use with angular js

Question

Obviously, there are a lot of mod rewrite discussions and answers all across the web. However, I am having a hard time grasping them. So I thought I would ask here.

Answer 1

The problem with this answer is that you still want 404s for file-not-found. Depending on how a person is building their front-end application, its very common for people to have css or other files return 404, especially if they are building larger dynamic applications, or are outsourcing the front-end work. Also, angular routes are usually not related to anything on the file system. The above may work if you narrow it down to a single directory. For instance, I will often use a common prefix for all angular routes that is not related to the file-system layout (/ajs/). If you can do

FallbackResource /app/index.html
 

Then it would make more sense, but that doesn't seem to work for me. Using a common prefix also makes the backend rules much simpler no matter the backend. For instance, you can setup a simple server forward controller if you aren't using a reverse proxy. And it makes modeling your apache rewrite rules simple. For instance:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/ajs/(.+)$ /index.html

That said, I haven't seen the directory/fallback method before, so am interested to explore it for when the only rewrite I need is for the angular forward. Thanks!