URL Path Strategy

By default, Flutter adds a hash (#) into the URL for web apps:

Turning Off the Hash

The process for turning off the hash is documented but fiddly. go_router has built-in support for setting the URL path strategy, however, so you can simply call GoRouter.setUrlPathStrategy before calling runApp and make your choice:

void main() {
  // turn on the # in the URLs on the web (default)
  // GoRouter.setUrlPathStrategy(UrlPathStrategy.hash);

  // turn off the # in the URLs on the web
  GoRouter.setUrlPathStrategy(UrlPathStrategy.path);

  runApp(App());
}

Setting the path instead of the hash strategy turns off the # in the URLs:

If your router is created as part of the construction of the widget passed to the runApp method, you can use a shortcut to set the URL path strategy by using the urlPathStrategy parameter of the GoRouter constructor:

 // no need to call GoRouter.setUrlPathStrategy() here
 void main() => runApp(App());

/// sample app using the path URL strategy, i.e. no # in the URL path
class App extends StatelessWidget {
  ...
  final _router = GoRouter(
    routes: ...,

    // turn off the # in the URLs on the web
    urlPathStrategy: UrlPathStrategy.path,
  );
}

Configuring the Web Server

Finally, when you deploy your Flutter web app to a web server, it needs to be configured such that every URL ends up at your Flutter web app's index.html, otherwise Flutter won't be able to route to your pages. If you're using Firebase hosting, you can configure rewrites to cause all URLs to be rewritten to index.html.

If you'd like to test your release build locally before publishing, and get that cool redirect to index.html feature, you can use flutter run itself:

$ flutter run -d chrome --release lib/url_strategy.dart

Note that you have to run this command from a place where flutter run can find the web/index.html file.

Of course, any local web server that can be configured to redirect all traffic to index.html will do, e.g. live-server.