Seb's IT blog

Fix 404 error when opening SPA URLs

  • Jul 18, 2020

HTML5 History Mode

The default mode for vue-router is hash mode - it uses the URL hash to simulate a full URL so that the page won’t be reloaded when the URL changes.

To get rid of the hash, we can use the router’s history mode, which leverages the history.pushState API to achieve URL navigation without a page reload:

const router = new VueRouter({
  mode: 'history',
  routes: [...]
})

When using history mode, the URL will look “normal,” e.g. http://oursite.com/user/id. Beautiful!

Here comes a problem, though: Since our app is a single page client side app, without a proper server configuration, the users will get a 404 error if they access http://oursite.com/user/id directly in their browser. Now that’s ugly.

Not to worry: To fix the issue, all you need to do is add a simple catch-all fallback route to your server. If the URL doesn’t match any static assets, it should serve the same index.html page that your app lives in. Beautiful, again!

Example Server Configurations

Note: The following examples assume you are serving your app from the root folder. If you deploy to a subfolder, you should use the publicPath option of Vue CLI and the related base property of the router. You also need to adjust the examples below to use the subfolder instead of the root folder (e.g. replacing RewriteBase / with RewriteBase /name-of-your-subfolder/).

Apache

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
  RewriteEngine On
  RewriteBase /
  RewriteRule ^index\.html$ - [L]
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteRule . /index.html [L]
</IfModule>

Instead of mod_rewrite, you could also use FallbackResource.

nginx

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

Native Node.js

const http = require('http')
const fs = require('fs')
const httpPort = 80

http.createServer((req, res) => {
  fs.readFile('index.html', 'utf-8', (err, content) => {
    if (err) {
      console.log('We cannot open "index.html" file.')
    }

    res.writeHead(200, {
      'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=utf-8'
    })

    res.end(content)
  })
}).listen(httpPort, () => {
  console.log('Server listening on: http://localhost:%s', httpPort)
})

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