Gatsby should have consistent route resolution for development and production

[Algram]

Currently Gatsby resolves a fake "404"-Route, but only in development. The user gets confused by this as one might think this route will also show in production. That will never happen though, because the server won't find the page and therefore it wil return a real 404 status code.

My suggestion would be to remove this fake 404 page from development mode and instead show a proper error, since a link to a non-existant page is a proper error.

Here are two images from my blog to show you what I am talking about:

Development

Production:

[KyleAMathews]

Big 👍 to this! The development environment and production environment should be as consistent as possible so the current behavior is definitely wrong. Thanks for bringing this up!

This would be an easy first PR for someone — in the development server we have a list of all the pages

gatsby/lib/utils/develop.js

Line 32 in 477bdb9

return globPages(directory, (err, pages) => {

. Basically check against that when loading a page and return the 404 page if the page doesn't exist.

[vinnymac]

@Algram @KyleAMathews is this not dependent on server routing configuration? The 404 page loads the same for both development and production on my blog.

See production here

Also @KyleAMathews you propose changing the develop.js file to return a 404 page, but in the example above @Algram shows the 404 page loading just fine for development. What behavior does your recommended change create?

[radubrehar]

Has anyone started some work on this? Or can I offer to try & fix it?

[KyleAMathews]

Please do!

[KyleAMathews]

I think this was fixed? Comment or reopen if there's still trouble.