React Router and App Platform problems

@bobr21 👋

This is a great question, thanks for asking.

If you’re deploying a web service, then routing works as expected because it’s handling incoming traffic on all sub-routes. If you’re deploying a static site SPA, then you’ll only have the index.html served to incoming requests to / but not the sub-routes.

You can configure error_document: index.html in your app spec, so that incoming traffic will be rewritten to index.html while still maintaining the request path. The caveat with error_document is that those requests will have the status code of 404, but the content will show your index document as expected. We’ll be introducing a new configuration called catchall_document soon, that will solve this problem without that caveat; where the status code will be 200 instead of 404 while still rewriting as expected.

We currently don’t support configuring error_document via the UI, so you’ll have to use doctl and a custom spec YAML for now. Your app spec might look like something this:

name: sample-html
static_sites:
- name: site
  github:
    repo: digitalocean/sample-html
    branch: master
  error_document: index.html

You can then submit it using doctl with:

doctl apps create --spec .do/app.yaml

After doing this, you can manage your app via the UI as usual, and your deploy-on-push configuration will continue working as expected.

Thanks for using the App Platform, and happy coding!