Dots in URL lead to 404 (regression?)

⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️ Please do not ignore this template. If you do, your issue will be closed immediately.

• Read the docs.
• Make sure this is a Vite issue and not a framework-specific issue. For example, if it’s a Vue SFC related bug, it should likely be reported to https://github.com/vuejs/vue-next instead.
• This is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.

Describe the bug

URLs with dots are leading to a 404 error instead of correctly displaying the corresponding page.

Note that it works fine with a project created with Vue CLI but it doesn’t work with a project created with @vite/create-app (both using Vue 3 with Vue Router 4).

I guess this is a regression from https://github.com/vitejs/vite/issues/130 but many things have change with Vite 2 (especially project structure) so it’s hard for me to identify why the bug reappeared (but with some guidance I’m happy to help).

Reproduction

• 🔴 Repro created with @vite/create-app (not working): https://github.com/Deckluhm/vite-dots-url-bug
• 🟢 Repro created with Vue CLI (working): https://github.com/Deckluhm/vue-cli-dots-url-bug

Run projects and go to http://localhost:3000/just.a.test (or a similar URL).

System Info

• vite version: 2.0.1 (with @vitejs/plugin-vue 1.1.4)
• Operating System: Ubuntu 20.10
• Node version: 15.10.0
• Package manager (npm/yarn/pnpm) and version: Yarn 1.22.10

[patak-dev]

There was an issue created about this already here: https://github.com/vitejs/vite/issues/2245 But it was closed because of the use of a workaround with a plugin, that may also help you while this is open. Maybe there is a limitation I’m not aware of, but this looks like a bug, and the other issue was wrongly closed.

[silverwind]

The behaviour seems to be because vite assumes that if the final segment of the path contains ., the user meant to navigate to a file. This is a pretty bad assumption to take because files without . are valid too (although, uncommon) and modern SPAs generally expect all paths except static assets to be routed to index.html so client-side routing can take effect.

One solution could be to check existance in the file system, and if the file is not there, serve index.html, similar to try_files is often configured in nginx to serve prod apps. With such an mechanism, no option like https://github.com/vitejs/vite/pull/2634 is necessary as it’ll work correctly in all cases, but it will involve one additional stat call on each request.