react-router switch not working as expected

Question

I'm learning react and got stuck at react-routes

consider the following:

import React from "react";
import { BrowserRouter, Route, Switch } from "react-router-dom";

import HelloWorld from "./HelloWorld.jsx";

const Root = () => {
  return (
    <BrowserRouter>
      <div>
        <Switch>
          <Route path="/" exact component={HelloWorld} />
          <Route component={NoMatch} />
        </Switch>
      </div>
    </BrowserRouter>
  );
};

function NoMatch({ location }) {
  return (
    <div>
      <h3>
        No match found
      </h3>
    </div>
  );
}

export default Root;

on '/' this route, it renders HelloWorld component as expected but on other routes for examples abc it displays Cannot GET /abc instead of No match found

Solution 1

The code works just fine if you used create-react-app for setting up the react project but if you're using webpack configurations for manually setting up the project it requires devServer: {historyApiFallback: true,} for react routes to work.

Solution 2

This happens because your server is not set up to handle those routes specifically. The server it what determines what exists and what doesn't - react-router is just a tool to exploit it a bit.

Fix 1

You can avoid this issue by importing HashRouter from the react-router-dom package, rather than BrowserRouter.

The result will be routing based on URLs with a #/ prepending the route itself. So your route of / will now actually be #/.

Fix 2

Set up a reverse proxy (nginx) as the intermediary to serve your page from the Node.js server. Use a broad wildcard or get specific if you know you need more specific configurations. It will pass along the request URI/path to node still but not try to use them as separate endpoints each time or read files from the file system.

Solution 3

First you check your react version then after do like this if v5.1 and above

In order to use v6, you'll need to convert all your elements to <Routes>

You want to replace component to element into <Route ...>

example:- App.js

import Home from "./Home";
import About from "./About";

import {BrowserRouter as Router, Route, Routes } from "react-router-dom";

function App() {
  return (
    <Router>
      <Routes>
        <Route exact path="/" element={<Home />} />
        <Route path="/about" element={<About />} />
      </Routes>
    </Router>
  );
}


export default App;

after that your switch related error maybe gone! if still not working comment me i will help you

Comments

[Andy]

Does <Route path="*" component={NoMatch} /> work?

[Bhavay Anand]

Nope, issue still persist

[quirimmo]

which version or react-router-dom are you using?

[Bhavay Anand]

it's [email protected]

[Henry Woody]

are you getting there via a Link component (from React Router) or direct through the url? If direct, can you make a Link to '/abc' and see what happens?

[Bhavay Anand]

it turns out my code is fine but webpack.config.js requires this devServer: {historyApiFallback: true,} for react routes to work, don't know why.

[Bhavay Anand]

Thanks for the solution, actually I was using webpack configurations instead of create-react-app so webpack config requires devServer: {historyApiFallback: true,} for react routes. I don't what it does but adding this in webpack config file resolves the issue.

[Nikola]

historyApiFallback always sends responses to your index. It's required for BrowserRouter on SPAs. The HashRouter can work without the historyApiFallback, but you get those ugly hashes /#/ inside your uri.

[Gorr1995]

Thank you, man. I used eject in create-react-app and without this option which I added manually, the Switch component didn't work

[T PHo]

This answer needs more upvote, I didn't use create-react-app but made react project with webpack configuration, just added this option to webpack immediately solves my issue.

[Mayur Kambariya]

That's work for me thanks