How I Fixed 404 Errors in My Vue Project Deployed on Netlify

Recently, I ran into an issue when deploying my Vue project on Netlify. Everything worked perfectly fine on my local environment, but when I tried to access the pages directly through their URLs (e.g. https://example.com/about), I got 404 errors. After some research and experimentation, I found two solutions that worked for me.

Solution 1: Configure Netlify Server to Redirect Requests to Index.html

The first solution involves configuring the Netlify server to redirect all requests to the index.html file. This is necessary because when using Vue's client-side routing with HTML5 history mode, the app relies on the browser's history API to handle navigation and URL updates. However, when the app is deployed on a static host like Netlify, the server will not be able to handle these client-side routes properly.

To redirect all requests to the index.html file, you can add a _redirects file to the root of your Netlify project with the following contents:

/*    /index.html   200

This tells Netlify to redirect all requests to the index.html file. This way, your Vue app's router will handle the routing and serve the appropriate pages.

Solution 2: Configure Netlify with netlify.toml
The second solution involves configuring your Vue app using the netlify.toml file. This file allows you to customize various settings for your Vue project on Netlify.

Here's an example configuration that you can use:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/*"
  to = "/index.html"
  status = 200

In this configuration, the [[redirects]] section specifies a redirect rule that tells Netlify to redirect all requests to the index.html file.

Customize this configuration based on your project's specific requirements. For example, if you need to set up additional redirect rules or other settings, you can add them to the [[redirects]] section or other appropriate sections of the netlify.toml file.

Once you have created the netlify.toml file, make sure to commit it to your project's repository and push it to your Netlify site. Netlify will automatically detect the netlify.toml file and use it to configure your site.

I hope you find these solutions helpful. Good luck!