The question mark in the proxy example in the doc `-P http://localhost:8080?` is causing issue

Steps to reproduce the issue, if applicable. Include the actual command and output and/or stack trace.

I ran http-server /data -p 80 -P http://localhost:8080? as suggested in the doc. When I hit http://localhost/test, my downstream server (which listening on 8080) get /?/test

What did you expect to happen?

Maybe I don’t understand the purpose of the ? at the end. Removing the ? fix the issue. Is this a mistake in the doc or I missed anything?

Tell us about your environment

• exact http-server version: 0.12.3
• Node version: 12.18.3
• Platform: Windows 10

[elwinschmitz]

I think I had the same misunderstanding of that section in the README; As I thought it was explaining the use of the --proxy-option, but actually it isn’t. (See the discussion: https://github.com/http-party/http-server/issues/338#issuecomment-338601211)

That section in the README tries to explain a clever ‘workaround’ for when you want to test a Single-Page-App which handles its own urls (like Angular/React/Vue can with their Router-components).

The use-case you are looking for (similar to mine, I think), is to run your static front-end on http://loocalhost:80 and let all requests to /api/ for example, go to http://back-end.example.com/api/ (or locally to http://localhost:8080/api/)

To do that, you would be using ‘just’ the --proxy-option: npx http-server --port 80 --proxy http://back-end.example.com/

The ? in the URL in the README is only there to ‘pass’ the rest of the URL to your local index.html and let your framework’s Router handle it.

[rook2pawn]

is the basic setup that i use - what’s nice about this approach is that you have a clean separation between your SPA and your BE (repo, hosting/instances) and you can even put all sorts of things at your proxy level (administrative redirects, prevent spam attacks) so your logic on your SPA/BE/proxy are all cleanly split into the domains they are best suited for. i setup a small repo that ties this all together but you can do this setup on any framework you want.