Serving Apple App Site Association file using Nginx for React Apps

Designed by Aarthi

The AASA (short for apple-app-site-association) is a file that lives on your website and associates your website domain with your native app. In other words, it’s a safe way to prove domain ownership to iOS for deep linking.

There is no way to serve the apple-app-site-association from a react app. So we have to push the AASA file from the Nginx server.

Step 1 — Copy the AASA file to the server

Copy the AASA file apple-app-site-association.json or apple-app-site-association.applescript file to a particular location in the server.

I have uploaded the file in the following directory

/var/www/certificates/ios/

Step 2— Add a route to the Nginx config file

Go to the file where the Nginx config is written. Its usually in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default. To open the file, try the following commands in terminal

cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/
sudo vim default

Add the following config to the Nginx configuration file above the line where you find this location / {

location /apple-app-site-association {
    alias /var/www/certificates/ios/;
    index apple-app-site-association.json
    autoindex on;
}

Step 3 — Check and Restart the Nginx server

To check if your Nginx configuration is correct, run the below command in a terminal

nginx -t

If you get the following output then you are good to go. Else, there is something wrong with your Nginx server configuration.

nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful

Now, restart the Nginx server for the changes to take effect.

sudo service nginx restart

Step 4— Testing the output

Now when to try to visit the route /apple-app-site-association you will be served the apple-app-site-association.json file

https://example.com/apple-app-site-association

The complete default file is given below

Hooray!!, Now you can provide domain ownership for apple using the AASA file.

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