I've exported and deployed a static site with some markdown pages following the default example. I'...

# kobweb

[Christopher Mederos]

I've exported and deployed a static site with some markdown pages following the default example.

I'm getting 404 responses when accessing those pages (https://my-app.com/about). However, if I go to my home page then click on a link to navigate there ( go to https://my-app.com then click on a link for https://my-app.com/about).... the pages are found!

Curious if this sounds like an export configuration I'm missing in kobweb, or if I'm just having DNS issues

[David Herman]

kobweb export --layout static?

[David Herman]

What's your hosting provider?

[Christopher Mederos]

kobweb export --layout static - yea that's the one!

I'm using Digital Ocean's App Platform

[David Herman]

Usually a 404 in the way you're deciding means a static hosting provider combined with a fullstack layout, huh. Can you check the final files as uploaded to their platform? I'd want to verify that a top level file named about.html is there.

[David Herman]

I'm not familiar with Digital Ocean but maybe it's not configured correctly I'd guess

[David Herman]

I found this: https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/manage-static-sites/

[David Herman]

So double check that?

[David Herman]

Basically both static and fullstack layouts output a root index.html file so that's almost definitely what is being downloaded when you visit your site without the about part.

[David Herman]

Once things are downloaded locally, then yeah you can navigate around without ever revisiting the server -- this is the power of something like Kobweb. You get an initial download and after that everything is local and instant to run.

[David Herman]

That's why you can link to the about route in that case, because everything is downloaded. But when you visit the url, at that point you're asking the server for the initial file to download, and it says it doesn't have it

[Christopher Mederos]

hmm seems like it is uploading the pages (such as about.html)

[David Herman]

That's good!

[David Herman]

Check your server setup then, that's my current suspicion

[David Herman]

Also, you should open up the network dev tools panel and then visit the about URL

[David Herman]

Maybe there will be some insight there into what is going wrong

[David Herman]

(I think you have to toggle recording on inside the UI somewhere, with chrome)

[David Herman]

See also: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/network

[Christopher Mederos]

Interesting... seems like Digital Ocean doesn't support wildcard rewrites (nor did it throw any errors about it)

I had to add a rewrite for each page like /about -> / whereas before I was trying /* -> /

[David Herman]

https://docs.digitalocean.com/products/app-platform/how-to/manage-static-sites/#configure-a-static-site

In this section they talk about setting a catchall file

[David Herman]

Just set that to index.html and move on with your life! 🙂

[Christopher Mederos]

nice recommendation!

How do you reckon I handle actual 404's for pages I don't have, so that I don't end up with a reload loop?

[David Herman]

You'll download the index file and then Kobweb will show a 404 itself (if a route is invalid)

[David Herman]

The default error UI is pretty minimal but you can customize it

[Christopher Mederos]

Ok interesting, my reload loops were actually coming from an uncaught error

qu {message: "Call 'navigateTo' at least once before calling 'renderActivePage'", cause: undefined, name: 'qu', stack: "qu: Call 'navigateTo' at least once before calling…  at A (<https://swell-scope.com/site.js:1:524631>)"}

[David Herman]

Ah

[David Herman]

That's tricky to debug. I'm trying to remember what that might be

[David Herman]

I feel like I wouldn't have expected a user to see that

[Christopher Mederos]

just seeing that in the console, but results in rerequesting the page again seems like

[David Herman]

The error comes from here: https://github.com/varabyte/kobweb/blob/a694950e0301f6f42f130ac4ccef3acd3e9c7c0d/frontend/kobweb-core/src/jsMain/kotlin/com/varabyte/kobweb/navigation/Router.kt#L237

and basically means you are trying to render a page before the system ever even visited the first page.

[David Herman]

Kobweb is supposed to do this for you, unless you're not actually depending on Kobweb directly but are setting things up manually

[David Herman]

So if you've built your site locally, you can search for main.kt under your build folder, it will be in a generated subfolder

[David Herman]

You can find that it calls tryRoutingTo which satisfies the navigateTo part of the error message. You can also see how it sets up calls to renderActivePage in there.