support PUBLIC_URL during development as well

Created by: PavelPolyakov

Is this a bug report?

Situation

Imagine I want to have the next product structure:

SPA (created using create-react-app), which is going to be served as /auth
API, which is going to be served as /auth/api/*
gateway, which resolves all the requests to the appropriate microservices

Here is a demo repo I prepared.

Problem

In the current version of CRA the variable PUBLIC_URL is ignored during the development. The closest answer to the question why? which I found was this: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/commit/30ee52cf3b2cbb6ac70999c02b1196bcaba8d4ca#diff-a7f98c18479be87c9f33e7604dbd1a09L33

which was updated by https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/commit/30ee52cf3b2cbb6ac70999c02b1196bcaba8d4ca#diff-dc0c4e7c623b73660da1809fc60cf6baR74 (@Timer)

But this is exactly what prevents people from developing CRA applications while being under the gateway. I think it is quite handy in the "microservices" world.

Question

Are there any solutions to this problem? Is this something we can change in the CRA behaviour?

Regards,