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You might run into the following error after deploying a single page React site using React Router to Netlify.

Page Not Found

Looks like you've followed a broken link or entered a URL that doesn't exist on this site.

Error message on Netlify

How did the error occur?

React Router handles routing on the client side (browser) so when you visit non-root page (e.g. https://yoursite.netlify.com/else), Netlify (server-side) does not know how to handle the route.
(As your routes are set up in the root level).

Error Code & Demo

Here is the simplest code using React Router.

https://gist.github.com/dance2die/fae8d963496b66dc2d23f5605d478976

And the error occurring on Netlify when you go to https://<netlify domain>/else directly.

Page Not Found Demo

How can we fix it?

Netlify offers a special file, _redirects, which you can add to your code base and let Netlify handle how to handle the URL that is not handled on the client-side.

Netlify documentation has a section, History Pushstate and Single Page Apps, which shows you how to redirect to the root of your SPA URL (but doesn't mention React Router, as it applies to other client-side frameworks/libraries).

So to fix the issue, we need to create a file named _redirects to the root of your site with following content.

https://gist.github.com/dance2die/acf9a148ec8025364bf0b6cf37367294

_redirect static file

Change _index.html_ accordingly to match the SPA root.

Here is the working site.

Netlify successfully redirected to the SPA root

For more ways & restrictions for redirect, check out the official Netlify documentation.

Resources

• Where I found out the answer - How do you handle frontend routing with Netlify and React Router v4? on Reddit.
• _redirects Netlify documentation for SPA.
• Source code with _redirects file.
• Source code without _redirects file.
• Netlify site with _redirects file.
• Netlify site without _redirects file.