Firebase default hosting domains: only .firebaseapp.com works but .web.app fails

Question

I'm building a very simple one-page react application using typescript. I tried hosting it using Firebase Hosting. Surprisingly, only the domain [name].firebaseapp.com works but [name].web.app shows the "Site not found" default page:

site-not-found image

I am using a basic firebase config (the default one you get using firebase init):

{
  "hosting": {
    "public": "build",
    "ignore": [
      "firebase.json",
      "**/.*",
      "**/node_modules/**"
    ]
  }
}

I get the "Site not found" when I go on [name].web.app. I would have suspected something was wrong with the index.html, the rewrites, the build folder, etc... but then why would I see the page functional on [name].firebaseapp.com and hosted nicely and it should be?

There is a few things I suspect:

• The domain name is not available from firebase itself (although why would firebase name the domain something that is invalid if that was the case when creating the project)
• The files are being pushed to the [name].firebaseapp.com domain only (in that case, how can you control that?)

Answer 1

The same weird problem happened to me this weekend. Exact symptoms:

• before any deployments, I opened example.web.app but not example.firebaseapp.com
• after the first deployment, example.web.app shows "Site not found" but example.firebaseapp.com works as expected. Consequently my customer domain shows "Site not found" as well.

---

Per one of the suggestions by support, now fixed by these commands:

curl -X PURGE https://your.notworking.url

For my case, it was just example.web.app and my custom domain. So fixed in 20 seconds.

---

Suggestions that did NOT work:

• messing with the browser (clear browser cache, incognito mode etc)
• re-deploying

Explanation:

The site not found thing got cached on their CDN server. So naturally, clearing local browser cache did not work. Weirdly re-deploying also did not working.

Another helpful note is, in the response there is a x-served-by header, which tells you the CDN server your web app is cached on.

Special thanks to Hugo Varela from firebase support.