Netlify renders 404 on page refresh (using React and react-router)

Question

I have deployed my site with Netlify, and I’m having trouble with the routing.

Here is my website: https://redux-co.netlify.com/

And my GitHub repo: https://github.com/jenna-m/redux-co

Specifically, if a user navigates to any page besides the home page and refreshes the page, the default Netlify 404 renders. From the 404 page, if I navigate back to the home page and refresh, the home page is rendered.

Also, my custom 404 page isn’t working as it does when I’m on localhost:3000, but I would like to get this refresh issue figured out first before dealing with my custom 404 component.

I’m using React and react-router, and I understand that since I’m using react-router, my website won’t deploy right out of the box.

---

This is my _redirects file, which is in the /public folder with my index.html file:

/*    /index.html   200

This is my “build” located in package.json:

…
  "scripts": {
    "start": "react-scripts start",
    "build": "react-scripts build && cp build/index.html build/404.html",
    "test": "react-scripts test",
    "eject": "react-scripts eject"
  }
…

---

I have read about other people experiencing this and what they’ve done to overcome the problem. This is what I’ve referenced so far…

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-deploy-a-react-application-to-netlify-363b8a98a985/

https://hugogiraudel.com/2017/05/13/using-create-react-app-on-netlify/

This person was using Vue and not React, but I gave these solutions an attempt anyway:

https://github.com/vuejs/vuepress/issues/457#issuecomment-390206649

https://github.com/vuejs/vuepress/issues/457#issuecomment-463745656

Answer 1

This was simple and it worked for me. I found this link https://create-react-app.dev/docs/deployment#netlify

So as suggested by that link, I added a _redirects file inside the /public folder like /public/_redirects. I then pasted /* /index.html 200 into the _redirects file. I did all that in my VS Code, after which I pushed to github and then ofcourse my netlify re-deploys automatically everytime I push to github. My problem was solved and refresh nolonger brings the 404 error.

In my package.json, the build section looks like this;

"scripts": {
   "start": "react-scripts start",
   "build": "react-scripts build",
   "test": "react-scripts test",
   "eject": "react-scripts eject"
}

Note: Some articles say that you need to add _redirects in the build folder, but then build folder is not among what gets pushed to github in my case, so that's why adding _redirects to public folder worked better for me, as the public folder can be pushed along with my code.