Docusaurus - How to redirect requests to /docs to a default url instead of getting a 404 error

I recently run into an HTTP 404 error when calling /docs on my Docusaurus websites. This isn't actually nice, because I expected to land on my documentation entry page e.g. introduction. First I thought, perhaps this is an issue with my setup. But I found out that even the Docusaurus website itself is suffering from this issue as well. So I tried to find a solution on the internet. But I couldn't find anything except an issue on github describing the same behavior. So, with this article I try to help everyone saving their time and making the experience with Docusaurus even better.

So here is my solution.

1. Go to your website\siteConfig.js file and update the entry doc link in the headerLinks section by adding href: "/docs" to it.

Before

{
  // code omitted for brevity
  headerLinks: [
    {
      doc: "your-entry-doc",
      label: "Docs",
    },
  ];
}

After

{
  // code omitted for brevity
  headerLinks: [
    {
      doc: "your-entry-doc",
      href: "/docs",
      label: "Docs",
    },
  ];
}

2. Create a new file called docs.js under the website\pages\en path and insert the following code.

/**
 * Copyright (c) 2017-present, Facebook, Inc.
 *
 * This source code is licensed under the MIT license found in the
 * LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
 */

const React = require("react");
const Redirect = require("../../core/Redirect.js");

const siteConfig = require(process.cwd() + "/siteConfig.js");

function docUrl(doc, language) {
  return (
    siteConfig.baseUrl +
    "docs/" +
    (language ? language + "/" : "") +
    doc +
    ".html"
  );
}

class Docs extends React.Component {
  render() {
    return (
      <Redirect
        redirect={docUrl("your-entry-doc", this.props.language)}
        config={siteConfig}
      />
    );
  }
}

module.exports = Docs;

This code is just doing a redirect to /docs/your-entry-doc. Don't forget to replace your-entry-doc with your own value.

Perfect! With this little change, our Docusaurus website is now able to handle requests to the /docs root path.

One little thing: I have tested it with Docusaurus version 1.5.1. However, just try it!