How to serve a Single Page Application (SPA)

Serving a Single Page Application (an app with client-side routing, e.g. a React or Angular app) is as trivial as specifying the name of your single page:

$ ws --spa index.html
Serving at http://mbp.local:8000, http://127.0.0.1:8000, http://192.168.0.100:8000

By default, requests for typical SPA paths (e.g. /user/1, /login) return 404 Not Found as a file at that location does not exist. By marking index.html as the SPA you create this rule:

If a static file is requested (e.g. /css/style.css) then serve it, if not (e.g. /login) then serve the specified SPA file and handle the route client-side.

Custom asset test

By default, any path containing a . (full stop) is considered a static file. To change this, pass a regular expression to --spa.asset-test.

For example, this command will treat only files ending with .json as a static resource, otherwise the SPA will be returned.

$ ws --spa index.html --spa.asset-test '\.json$'

Filesystem asset test

If the --spa.asset-test regular expression becomes too complicated use --spa.asset-test-fs. This option will use disk I/O to identify an asset file. This option is less efficient but more reliable than spa.asset-test.

If the file exists on disk, ws will serve it else return the SPA. If also specified, spa.asset-test will be ignored.

$ ws --spa index.html --spa.asset-test-fs