using '*' with express.static redirects all the urls

I am facing quite an unexpected behavior. I am using express for my back-end REST api and to serve the statics which is a Polymer front-end application. If I use

app.use(express.static('public/build'));
// or
app.use('/', express.static('public/build'));

and start my node app, and request http://localhost:3000/, the application works normally. Again it is a Polymer application that means if I click on local links the page is not refreshing because it’s using the history api, so for instance if I click <a href="/about">about</a> the application will just load the appropriate view and will request appropriate data using an Ajax mechanism. That means the application seems to work normally but If I refresh the page say while the URL is http://localhost:3000/about express won’t have a clue what /about route is and will just output Cannot GET /about on the page.

My Polymer apps need to be able to handle every URLs because there is also a 404 view, so it’s ok to direct all routes to the same statics. My first thought was to write :

app.use('*', express.static('public/build'));

But now I encounter this issue where express tries to redirect (301) all my URLs,

it redirects all URLs even the static files like scripts and try to add a trailing slashes, which results in a complete fails to load my application…

[vdegenne]

@wesleytodd thanks for your answer, this is exactly what I found out today. I knew I was doing something wrong, because I was dynamically creating routes. I thought static was for… static routes ? But It is more right to think as “static files”.

[wesleytodd]

Typically I do something like this to solve the problem you are describing:

app.use('/static', static('.'))
app.use((req, res) => {
  res.render('index');
})

Then I point the asset urls to /static/... and everything else will end in rendering the index template. Make sense?