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How to publish on Github Pages with create-react-app and react-router

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Now I will be assuming a couple of things:

  • You have a GitHub account and you created a repository for your app.
  • You created a react app either with npx create-react-app <appName> or npx create-react-app <appName> --scripts-version=react-scripts-ts
  • Then let’s get started.

Add gh-pages

Run npm i -D gh-pages\

Configure your package.json

First, you need to tell the react app where it will be hosted. You need to add to your package.json the attribute ‘homepage’:

    { ...
    "homepage": "https://&lt;username&gt;.github.io/<RepositoryName>/"
    }

Additionally, you need to adjust the scripts attribute.

    "scripts": {
    ...
    "predeploy": "npm run build",
    "deploy": "gh-pages -d build"
    },

Now you can run npm deploy and it will automatically create a branch, build the app and deploy it into your repository. It will even configure your github repository that the branch gh-pages will be now hosted.  So you can simply navigate to  https://&lt;username&gt;.github.io/<RepositoryName>/ and see the result. # Configure React-Router Before we can publish we probably have to change a couple of things in the configuration of the react-router.

  1. We need to set the basename. The basename ensures that all links of the Router are relative to this basename. To configure the basename you can use the variable process.env.PUBLIC_URL this ensures that you only need to configure the url via the package.json.
  2. We need to ensure that we are using aHashRouter instead of the typical BrowserRouter . The difference is that the hashRouter adds a ’#’ into the url and upon a refresh of the page you will not see a 404 Github Error

Your index.js should look something like this:

    import * as React from 'react';
    import * as ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
    import { Router } from 'react-router';
    import createHashHistory from 'history/createHashHistory';

    const hashHistory = createHashHistory({ basename: process.env.PUBLIC_URL });

    ReactDOM.render(
        <Router history={hashHistory}>
          <App />
        </Router>,
      document.getElementById('root') as HTMLElement
    );

Deploy

Now can simply run `npm deploy` and your site should be published on https://&lt;username&gt;.github.io/<RepositoryName>/

Note: Since the build is published on a separate branch, your main repository may contain different src than what is published. So you still need to ensure that you commit your changes to your repository.