Possible to generate 404.html?

[mwskwong]

As suggested by the title, is it possible to generate/pre-render a 404.html in the production build?

[rschristian]

Yep, absolutely. This can be done using a prerender-urls.json file. Docs for which can be found here

Take the following, for example:

[
  {
    "url": "/",
    "title": "Homepage"
  },
  {
    "url": "/404",
    "title": "Homepage"
  }
]

This will prerender both / and /404. / -> <build directory>/index.html and /404 -> <build directory>/404/index.html. The title field gets passed into your HTML template, but you can set any arbitrary data this way if you'd like.

[mwskwong]

Yep, absolutely. This can be done using a prerender-urls.json file. Docs for which can be found here

Take the following, for example:

[
  {
    "url": "/",
    "title": "Homepage"
  },
  {
    "url": "/404",
    "title": "Homepage"
  }
]

This will prerender both / and /404. / -> <build directory>/index.html and /404 -> <build directory>/404/index.html. The title field gets passed into your HTML template, but you can set any arbitrary data this way if you'd like.

The issue is, most hosting platforms will treat 404.html as the default fallback for 404. And it has to be 404.html and nothing else. That means I have to add a postbuild script to move /404/index.html to /404.html.

[rschristian]

Any static file server should handle that just fine, it's an extremely common pattern and has been for many years.

But yes, if your hosting platform somehow doesn't support serving /404/index.html implicitly from /404 (which sounds seriously odd to me), you'll need to handle that yourself. A postbuild script or maybe using copy-webpack-plugin in your preact.config.js.

[chickencoding123]

Any static file server should handle that just fine, it's an extremely common pattern and has been for many years.

@rschristian that's not true. AWS S3, CloudFront etc... do not understand 404/index.html. They rely on a root level 404.html file and error.html file when available.

[rschristian]

@rschristian that's not true. AWS S3, CloudFront etc... do not understand 404/index.html.

Neither of those are web servers so yes, they might not come with all the expected tools out of the box. However, I do see there are configs to allow Cloudfront to support this behavior just fine.