SPA woes
For some time now I have wanted the ability to route paths for a gh-pages site to its index.html for handling as a single-page app. This ability is table stakes for single-page apps because you need all requests to be routed to one HTML file, unless you want to copy the same file across all your routes every time you make a change to your project. Currently GitHub Pages doesn’t offer a route handling solution; the Pages system is intended to be a flat, simple mechanism for serving basic project content.
If you weren’t aware, GitHub does provide one morsel of customization for your project site: the ability to add a 404.html file and have it served as your custom error page. I took a first stab at doing an SPA hack by simply copying my index.html file and renaming the copy to 404.html. Turns out many folks have experienced the same issue with GitHub Pages and liked the general idea: https://twitter.com/csuwildcat/status/730558238458937344. The issue that some folks on Twitter correctly raised was that the 404.html page is still served with a status code of 404, which is no bueno for crawlers. The gauntlet had been thrown down, but I decided to answer, and answer with vigor!
One more time, with feeling
After sleeping on it, I thought to myself: “Self, we’re deep in fuck-it territory, so why don’t I make this hack even dirtier?!” To that end, I developed an even better hack that provides the same functionality and simplicity, while also preserving your site’s crawler juice – and you don’t even need to waste time copying your index.html file to a 404.html file anymore! The following solution should work in all modern desktop and mobile browsers (Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari), and Internet Explorer 10+.
Template & Demo: If you want to skip the explanation and get the goods, here’s a template repo (https://github.com/csuwildcat/sghpa), and a test URL to see it in action: https://csuwildcat.github.io/sghpa/foo/bar
