How to serve React from subpath using Nginx

Question

My setup is a Django application served with gunicorn and Nginx. I am adding React one page at a time so therefore I need to only serve specific pages from React. To make it easier to route using Nginx I decided to make every React route start with /v2/.

Therefore the Nginx conf file looks like this right now:

upstream backend_server {
    server backend:8000;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name example.com *.example.com;
    deny 143.198.76.27;

    location /v2/ {
        alias /usr/share/nginx/html;
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://backend_server$request_uri;
        ....
    }
}

In the package.json I added the homepage:

{
  "name": "frontend",
  "homepage": "/v2",
   ...
}

I have also tried adjusting my BrowserRouter's basename:

ReactDOM.render(
  <Provider store={store}>
    <BrowserRouter basename="/v2">
      <App />
    </BrowserRouter>
  </Provider>,
  document.getElementById("root")
);

And for testing purposes I have made 3 routes:

function App() {
  return (
   <Routes>
     <Route path="/" element={<CounterPage/>}/>
     <Route path="/v2" element={<CounterPage/>}/>
     <Route path="/v2/test" element={<CounterPage/>}/>
   </Routes>
  );
}

My nginx build process for the Docker image looks like this (and the files are verified to be there):

FROM ghcr.io/digibrainllc/example/frontend:latest as build

# Create production build
RUN npm run build

# Production Nginx image with frontend build files
# to be served by Nginx
FROM nginx:1.21-alpine

# Copy the frontend build files over to the directory
# which Nginx serves from
COPY --from=build /frontend/build /usr/share/nginx/html

# Remove the default Nginx settings
RUN rm /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
COPY /nginx/conf/nginx.prod.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d

example.com/v2:

404 Not Found

I need all example.com/v2 routes serving React and the rest routed to Django.

How can I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Ok I got it working. To examine more closely I looked at the Nginx logs: docker logs [nginx_id].

During debugging I removed the alias and added a root to the main server block.

Then the nginx logs said the path was /usr/share/nginx/html/v2/ where the file was not found. So I logged into the nginx container docker exec -it [nginx_id] sh and copied the build files from /usr/share/nginx/html to /usr/share/nginx/html/v2. This allowed the files to be discovered...

So the changes were to:

• Add a root block in nginx
• Change my Dockerfile to copy the frontend/build files to usr/share/nginx/html/v2 instead.

Nginx.conf:

upstream backend_server {
    server backend:8000;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;
    server_name example.com *.example.com;
    deny 143.198.76.27;
    root /usr/share/nginx/html;

    location /v2/ {
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://backend_server$request_uri;
        ....
    }
}

Nginx Dockerfile:

# Copy the frontend build files over to the directory
# which Nginx serves from
COPY --from=build /frontend/build /usr/share/nginx/html/v2

I knew it would be something simple XD