Astro 404 page with Apache

I recently had the privilege to host a static Astro website on a cPanel server. And since cPanel uses Apache by default, the custom 404 page can be configured by a single line of code.

1. Create your 404 site - pages/404.astro. If you name it precisely this, Astro will route to it in dev mode!
2. Create a public/.htaccess file. Apache will pick up on this config file automatically, it will just get copied to the server

Put this line into .htaccess

# Redirect all 404 errors
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

Done, awesome. You could also redirect to your root if that makes sense for you.

Other approaches

• Checking the validity of the route with a index.php file (PHP takes precendence over HTML files)
• Running Astro in SSR mode (that means to have a Node web server running) and reverse proxying Apache to it

I think compared to those, the .htaccess file way is a pure beauty.