I'm new to web-hosting and cPanel, so please be nice to me... I have built a website using react and managed to upload its build file to cPanel. It seems to work fine, however, whenever I try to switch between pages, I get a 404 error, although the pages clearly exist (for example, when I press a button to switch to mydomainname.com/about-us). The switching works perfectly locally using react-router.. I would really appreciate it if someone could help me solve this problem! Thanks in advance!
This is because ReactJS uses client side routing.
To fix 404, create a .htaccess file and paste below contents and upload it to your site root. It should work.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.html [L]
If the above did not work, try below (recommended by ReactJS team), either one of this should work
Options -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^ index.html [QSA,L]
The switching works perfectly locally using react-router
Routing works fine with the inbuilt ReactJS web server but not with Apache web server. Also make sure you are using react router Link component to navigate between pages and not the html anchor (a) tag.