Why do I get a 404 for my static webpage? - amazon-web-services

Question

I’ve been working for about 2 years developing full stack apps (which were fairly mature when I get to them initially) and am starting up my first from scratch. I spent the day spinning up an EC2 instance, loading the dependencies for my stack (Postgres, golang, react), and all the other frills a shiny new machine needs (tmux, npm, vim plugins, git integration etc). I’m now stuck.
I used create-react-app to get started on my front end and running npm start to have a build going. To see this, I can go to my instanceip:3000.
I created golang server code which is serving up on port 8080 and I can hit my helloworld code by going to instanceip:8080/hello.
I added an axios call in my react code to get endpoint /hello which returns a 404.
I also attempted to make my golang handle the index.js as a static page for the instanceip:8080 and that returns a 404.
How do I get my different ports to play nice? I can’t figure out what I’m missing here.
Here’s a snippet of my server code in main:
indexLoc := os.Genenv(webRootEnv) + "/index.html" // verified this is the correct path to my static index.html file by logging it out
fs := http.FileServer(http.Dir(indexLoc))
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
http.Handle("/", fs)
Anyone have any ideas what I’m missing? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There are two things that could be the cause:
You're giving a file name to http.Dir, which expects a directory.
Your handler is registered after calling ListenAndServe, thus making it useless (http.Handle is never called)
You could fix it by changing your code like this:
indexLoc := os.Genenv(webRootEnv) // webRootEnv is a directory path
fs := http.FileServer(http.Dir(indexLoc))
http.Handle("/", fs) // register handler before listening
http.ListenAndServe(":8080", nil)
You might also want to handle the error returned from ListenAndServe to prevent silent failures of your program