Can I create routes with react-router for a github-pages site?

Question

Ok, so I've made a SPA using React and React-Router and have pushed it to github pages, but none of the routes I have written work when I refresh or click back in my browser. I had the same problem when I was serving the page locally, but then followed along to this SO answer and made a server.js file which provided a redirect to my static HTML page at each route. Here is what the file looks like:

"use strict";
let express = require('express');
let path = require('path');


let app = express();

app.use(express.static('public'));

app.get('/contact', function(req, res){
  res.sendFile('public/index.html', { root: __dirname });
})

app.get('/about', function(req, res){
  res.sendFile('public/index.html', { root: __dirname });
})

app.get('*', function(req, res){
  res.sendFile('public/index.html', { root: __dirname });
})

app.listen(8080, function(){
  console.log('Listening on port 8080!')
})

Now, my problem is that when I push the project to github pages all of that logic is ignored, github's routing takes over and I have the same problem of not being able to refresh or go straight to /contact or /about. I know it seems like an obvious problem to run into, since github pages is designed to only host static sites, but I've seen people hinting towards other ways of creating a static page for each route, such as the answer in this reddit post, but I have no idea how to do that.

I should also mention that because I already have a site at user-name.github.io, so this site is being hosted at user-name.github.io/projects, making that my / route. I have no idea if this makes any difference, I just thought I should mention it.

I think I've pretty much exhausted every option to try and successfully host this on gh-pages and I know there are projects like Single Page Apps for GitHub Pages to try and fix this issue but, I just wanted to see if anyone out there has had any luck doing this before resorting to that.

FYI, here is my app.js (containing routing logic):

import React, {Component} from 'react';
import {render} from 'react-dom';
import {Router, Route, browserHistory, IndexRoute} from 'react-router';
//Import custom components
import About from '../components/about.js';
import Contact from '../components/contact.js';
import Sidebar from '../components/sidebar.js';
import Imagelist from '../components/image-list.js';


  render(
      <Router history={browserHistory}>
        <Route path="/" component={Sidebar}>
          <IndexRoute component={Imagelist}/>
          <Route path="/about" component={About}/>
          <Route path="/contact" component={Contact}/>
        </Route>
      </Router>,
      document.getElementById('content')
    );

Any help with this would be much appreciated & happy to include more code if helpful.

Answer 1

I think you need to change your browserHistory to a hashHistory.. so you can use it with gh... it changes path from /home to #/home

Answer 2

If you are using create-react-app (I haven't tested this in any other environment) you can use browserRouter, you will need to pass a basename prop to the component with this env variable: process.env.PUBLIC_URL.

Your router should now look like this:

<BrowserRouter basename={process.env.PUBLIC_URL}>
  {/* routes */}
</BrowserRouter>

For more info you can checkout this Github thread

Use process.env.PUBLIC_URL in your route definitions so that they work both in development and after deployment. For example: . This will be empty in development and ... (inferred from homepage) in production.

Answer 3

Aside from using hashHistory as suggested in the accepted answer, there is another workaround. Look here.

Basically, you create a spoof 404.html file which has a script that converts the requested path into the query string & redirects the browser to the index page with the query string attached to the URL. After the index file is loaded, the original path is restored from the query string & ReactRouter picks up the changes.

A neat solution, but not production-ready, either.