React Routing works in local machine but not Heroku

React/react router/heroku question here (it is probably heroku where it is failing).

I am following this wonderful tutorial: https://medium.com/@patriciolpezjuri/using-create-react-app-with-react-router-express-js-8fa658bf892d#.y77yjte2j and everything works up to the point where I post it to heroku and I try to navigate to https://appname.herokuapp.com/about and I get a 404 Not Found/nginx error. Of course, per the tutorial it is supposed to display an About page.

Bottomline: React router is not working on heroku and I can't figure out why.

I have tried modifying my server/app.js file as suggested in this: React routes are not working in facebook's create-react-app build

// server/app.js
const express = require('express');
const morgan = require('morgan');
const path = require('path');

const app = express();

console.log('hi from /src/server.js')
// Setup logger
app.use(morgan(':remote-addr - :remote-user [:date[clf]] ":method :url HTTP/:http-version" :status :res[content-length] :response-time ms'));

// Serve static assets
app.use(express.static(path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'build')));

// Always return the main index.html, so react-router render the route in the client

app.get('/about', (req, res) => {

  console.log('hi from app.get.about')
  console.log(req)
  console.log(res)
  res.sendFile(path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'build', 'index.html'));
});
app.get('/*', (req, res) => {

  console.log('hi from app.get')
  console.log(req)
  console.log(res)
  res.sendFile(path.resolve(__dirname, '..', 'build', 'index.html'));
});


module.exports = app;

but it doesnt work nor does it log anything at all in the console:

2017-01-20T21:03:47.438140+00:00 heroku[web.1]: Starting process with command `bin/boot`
2017-01-20T21:03:49.540005+00:00 app[web.1]: Injecting runtime env into /app/build/static/js/main.242e967b.js (from .profile.d/inject_react_app_env.sh)
2017-01-20T21:03:49.695317+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting log redirection...
2017-01-20T21:03:49.695899+00:00 app[web.1]: Starting nginx...
2017-01-20T21:03:51.108255+00:00 heroku[web.1]: State changed from starting to up
2017-01-20T21:04:22.720627+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/" host=sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com request_id=fb8bc13b-f6b5-47bc-8330-443f28e211df fwd="132.147.73.97" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=3ms status=200 bytes=627
2017-01-20T21:04:22.746761+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.158.165.5 - - [20/Jan/2017:21:04:22 +0000] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 386 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36"
2017-01-20T21:04:23.076521+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.158.165.5 - - [20/Jan/2017:21:04:23 +0000] "GET /static/js/main.242e967b.js HTTP/1.1" 200 62263 "https://sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36"
2017-01-20T21:04:23.056416+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/static/js/main.242e967b.js" host=sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com request_id=436d5ce5-ee39-4ab7-9e12-f5871e0fd552 fwd="132.147.73.97" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=25ms status=200 bytes=62540
2017-01-20T21:04:23.745285+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/static/css/main.9a0fe4f1.css" host=sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com request_id=80438aaa-58c4-456e-8df9-7a29e49bc4ba fwd="132.147.73.97" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=2ms status=200 bytes=560
2017-01-20T21:04:23.766676+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.158.165.5 - - [20/Jan/2017:21:04:23 +0000] "GET /static/css/main.9a0fe4f1.css HTTP/1.1" 200 301 "https://sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36"
2017-01-20T21:04:24.044940+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/static/media/logo.5d5d9eef.svg" host=sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com request_id=bcbc1906-3b90-4f13-a700-f432f79c725d fwd="132.147.73.97" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=1ms status=200 bytes=2902
2017-01-20T21:04:24.065013+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.158.165.5 - - [20/Jan/2017:21:04:24 +0000] "GET /static/media/logo.5d5d9eef.svg HTTP/1.1" 200 2671 "https://sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36"
2017-01-20T21:04:26.264631+00:00 heroku[router]: at=info method=GET path="/about" host=sentieoapp1.herokuapp.com request_id=0caef324-9268-4ebb-a3f5-0fb047100893 fwd="132.147.73.97" dyno=web.1 connect=0ms service=4ms status=404 bytes=403
2017-01-20T21:04:26.284717+00:00 app[web.1]: 10.158.165.5 - - [20/Jan/2017:21:04:26 +0000] "GET /about HTTP/1.1" 404 191 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36"

and this is where I'm stuck. I am familiar with Express and have gotten it to work on heroku before but this is a whole nother level of nightmare. I understand that this is not server side routing but rather react doing routing from within a single index.html page. But if I can get it to work on my local machine why does it not work on Heroku?

Solution

I actually came across this post first before 3 hours of searching through react-router and heroku documentation. For swyx, and anyone else having the same problem, I'll outline the minimum of what you need to do to get this working.

router.js - (Obviously change AppSplash and AppDemo to your components)

export default <Router history={hashHistory}>
  <Route path="/" component={App}>
    <IndexRoute component={AppSplash}/>
    <Route path="demo" component={AppDemo}/>
  </Route>
</Router>

app.js

import React, { Component } from 'react'

class App extends Component {
static propTypes = {
  children: PropTypes.node
}

render() {
  const { children } = this.props
  return (
    <div>
      {children}
    </div>
  )
}
}

export default App

Create a new file in the root of your home directory and name it static.json. Put this into it.

{
  "root": "build/",
  "clean_urls": false,
  "routes": {
    "/**": "index.html"
  }
}

Push to heroku again. The routes should work this time.

Explanation:

You need to modify Heroku's default webpack, otherwise the service gets confused with how to handle the client-side routing. Essentially what static.json does. The rest is just the correct way to handle the routing according to the 'react-router' documentation.