I have a nice little side project based on the Goodreads API (yes, my key is still active). I had it up for a while and whenever I would refresh a page while it was deployed it would lose context to the page. This is because Netlify didn’t know how to handle the state I had gotten myself into because the routing in create-react-app that I was using was react-router.

Luckily enough this is an easy fix, so if you also have the following:

• Create React App client side routing through react-router
• Deploy your site on Netlify

…then you will be able to make the same change and have your page context persist after refreshes!

Creating a Redirects File 💻

In your public directory create a new __redirects file with the following code:

/*  /index.html  200

Now when the project gets built by Netlify, Create-React-App will place the contents of the public directory into the build output. Allowing Netlify to handle pushState from within your application. That’s it!