title: React: Accessing a page outside React app, inside public folder
body: <p>I have a React application created by <code>create-react-app</code>. The app works fine, but I have run into a problem</p>
  
  <p>I need to test som ad things on a plain html site, no additional React code. The problem I have is that the <code>ads.txt</code> tags need to be crawled by Google, which can take up to 24 hours on a new page/URL, time that I don't really have.</p>
  
  <p>So I did the following. In my repo under <code>/public</code> folder I added a folder <code>/ad-test</code> with an <code>index.html</code> inside. When I serve it locally using <code>npm start</code> and go to <code>http://localhost:3000/ad-test</code>, it works fine.</p>
  
  <p>Great, I thought and deployed it to the production environment, but now when I try to go to <code>http://[my-site]/ad-test</code> or <code>http://[my-site]/yo-test/index.html</code> it does not work (I get the React 404 site that I created).</p>
  
  <p>I looked <a href="https://facebook.github.io/create-react-app/docs/using-the-public-folder" rel="noreferrer">here</a> and if I understand correctly, it is not possible to do it the way that I tried since the build stage will not include the public folder. Am I correct in this?</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how to solve this?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have a good knowledge of React and React Router in general, the app already uses <code>&lt;Switch&gt;&lt;Route ... /&gt;&lt;/Switch&gt;</code> with a catch-all route directing to Not Found Component and the bottom.</p>
  
  <p>The problem I have is that we include some ad scripts from an ad provider. The ads are not displayed in the application (adblockers totally removed from browser etc.) and the provider thinks that we have made errors in the React code.</p>
  
  <p>We don't think that we made any errors (the ads were displayed fine in our test environment but not in prod) and we have to prove that React is not to blame for the ads not showing.</p>
  
  <p>To do this we created a static HTML file with all ads hardcoded, no React components or other things that might disturb. BUT, because of ads and Google crawlers and ads.txt, we need to have the static test page under the same domain as our main page/application.</p>
  
  <p>This is why I ask if it is possible to somehow add a static HTML that can be reached from <code>http://my.page/test-page.html</code> without being "intercepted" by react router, i.e. it exists outside React but on the same server.</p>