react.js application showing 404 not found in nginx server

I uploaded react.js application to a server. I'm using nginx server. Application is working fine. But when I go to another page & refresh, the site is not working. It's showing a 404 Not found error.

How can I solve this?

11 Answers

When your react.js app loads, the routes are handled on the frontend by the react-router. Say for example you are at . Then on the page you navigate to . This route change is handled in the browser itself. Now when you refresh or open the url in the a new tab, the request goes to your nginx where the particular route does not exist and hence you get 404.

To avoid this, you need to load the root file(usually index.html) for all non matching routes so that nginx sends the file and the route is then handled by your react app on the browser. To do this you have to make the below change in your nginx.conf or sites-enabled appropiately

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

This tells nginx to look for the specified $uri, if it cannot find one then it send index.html back to the browser. (See for more details)

The answers given here are correct. But, I was struggling with this when trying to deploy my React Application in a docker container. The problem was on, how to change the nginx configs inside a docker container.

Step 1: Prepare your Dockerfile

# Stage 1 FROM node:8 as react-build WORKDIR /app COPY . ./ RUN yarn RUN yarn build # Stage 2 - the production environment FROM nginx:alpine COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf COPY --from=react-build /app/build /usr/share/nginx/html EXPOSE 80 CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"] 

See line with command: COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf. Here, we are telling Docker to copy the nginx.conf file from the docker host, to the docker container.

Step 2: Have a nginx.conf file in your application root folder

server { listen 80; server_name localhost; location / { root /usr/share/nginx/html; index index.html index.htm; try_files $uri /index.html; } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } } 

Step 3: Now build the docker image and run it

$ docker build . -t react-docker 

This should build your docker image successfully. To check that, run

$ docker images 

Now run

$ docker run -p 8000:80 react-docker 

and navigate to

This was inspired by this blog.

For me the solution was:

location / { root /var/www/myapp/build; index index.html; try_files $uri /index.html$is_args$args =404; } 

After many hours I finally got this working with:

try_files $uri /index.html$is_args$args =404; 

The last arg (=404) is what made this work.

This worked for me while using nginx to serve react:

Edit the location section of the nginx.conf(or can also be default.conf) file to be as below. The nginx.conf file is found somewhere in /etc/nginx/sites-available/yoursite

location / { # First attempt to serve request as file, then # as directory, then redirect to index(angular) if no file found. try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } 

The full nginx.conf configuration will therefore be as below:

 server { listen 80 default_server; server_name localhost; root /usr/share/nginx/html; index index.html index.htm; location /{ try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; } } 

The problem comes when you are in a path for eg and you hit refresh you get a 404 error page. This extra line in the ngnix configuration could solve the issue.

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

After adding do a nginx service restart.

This worked for me

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

If your are using nextjs like I am, maybe you need add this to next.config.js

module.exports = { trailingSlash: true, } 

And build your project again.

For reference:

server { listen 80; listen [::]:80; root /var/www/your_domain/html; index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html; server_name your_domain location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404; } } 

In location /index.html points to index.html on reload.

try using following commands in sites-enabled

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/Your_WEB_Folder try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html; 

Get me some towers now!

I was facing the same issue and fixed it. I was facing this when I deployed my app on AWS EC2, the App was running but after refers it was showing the error "404 not found".

Solution: It might be possible that your system or EC2 doesn't have the nginx installed.

Step 1: First you need to install the nginx by using the below command:

sudo apt update sudo apt install nginx 

Step 2: Restart the nginx by command sudo service nginx restart

Step 3: Go to your react app and create a nginx.conf file and write the below codes:

server { listen 80; server_name localhost; location / { root /usr/share/nginx/html; index index.html index.htm; try_files $uri /index.html; } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root /usr/share/nginx/html; } } 

Step 4: Update your dockerfile, and add the COPY command to copy the nginx.conf file to /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf. Here are the full Dockerfile codes:

FROM node:14 as builder WORKDIR /app COPY package.json . RUN npm i --production COPY . . RUN npm run build FROM nginx COPY nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf EXPOSE 80 COPY --from=builder /app/build /usr/share/nginx/html CMD ["nginx", "-g", "daemon off;"] 

Step 5: Now build your app using whatever technique, whether CI/CD or manually, and see the changes, It will work.