Flask, serving a React application: cannot refresh "pages"

Question

So I am serving a index.html file from Flask. The index.html file comes from a built project using: https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

I have a couple routes setup in the React app, for example: "/users" and "/contracts"

When I refresh one of these routes, I get a 404 from flask, but while "clicking" on links found on the site, they work perfectly fine.

Answer 1

When you are clicking the links in the interface, React is re-rendering the page without any server-side intervention, and then updating the route in the URL bar. When loading however, you are making that route request to the server direct, and Flask does not have that route registered.

Simplest way is to register these routes in the decorator for the function serving your homepage view

@app.route('/')
@app.route('/users')
@app.route('/contracts')
def home_page():

If there are many many routes, you may want to use the catch-all URL pattern.