How can I deploy an ASP.NET Web API with React frontend to IIS?

Question

I am trying to deploy my react app with a .NET Web API backend to IIS. In order to get the react app to show up I add the "homepage" property to my package.json for example "homepage": "/testapp/". The client app works and routes properly but any requests to the api just return the react app again instead of json data. When I launch the app locally in Visual Studio using IIS Express everything works fine. When I deploy the app all of api my routes for example /testapp/api/logs no longer return data (/api/logs returns 404). Does anyone have any insight on how to handle client side vs back end routing when deploying to IIS?

Answer 1

It was an issue with the connection to the data string. I added a test controller and found that the api was returning static data successfully. When it tried to hit the database it would return the index.html as an exception. I changed my site's authentication in IIS from anonymous to windows authentication and now my API returns data.