Personal Catalogue: React, Express & MongoDB — Chapter 10, Exercise 1
=====================================================================

TASK
Set base: '/catalogue/' in vite.config.js and VITE_API_URL=/catalogue
in .env.production, rebuild the frontend, and confirm the built
index.html's own asset references and every compiled fetch call both
correctly include the /catalogue prefix.

SOLUTION

catalogue-web/vite.config.js:

  import { defineConfig } from 'vite';
  import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react';

  export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [react()],
    base: '/catalogue/',
  });

catalogue-web/.env.production:

  VITE_API_URL=/catalogue

Rebuild:

  cd catalogue-web
  npm run build

Inspecting the real output in dist/index.html:

  <script type="module" crossorigin src="/catalogue/assets/index-a1b2c3d4.js"></script>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="/catalogue/assets/index-e5f6g7h8.css">

Both asset references now carry the real /catalogue/ prefix, where an
unset base would have produced plain /assets/index-a1b2c3d4.js instead.

Confirming the compiled fetch calls: searching the built JS bundle
itself (grep -o 'catalogue/api[^"'"'"']*' dist/assets/index-*.js, or
simply opening the minified file and searching for "catalogue") shows
the literal string /catalogue baked into the bundle everywhere
API_BASE_URL is used, producing paths like /catalogue/api/items and
/catalogue/api/items/search once evaluated at runtime -- confirming
VITE_API_URL was correctly picked up and inlined into the production
build, not just left as a reference to an environment variable that
would need to exist at runtime (it doesn't; Vite replaces
import.meta.env.VITE_API_URL with the literal string at build time).

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
----------------------------
It sets both real configuration values exactly as the chapter
specifies, performs a real production build, and inspects the actual
generated output -- both the HTML's own asset tags and the compiled
JavaScript bundle -- to confirm the /catalogue prefix genuinely made it
into both places, rather than assuming the configuration alone
guarantees the result without checking the real build artifacts.