So, you know when you access a view with django rest api on the browser, you get an html page, and when you send something like an ajax request, you get the json? I'm trying to figure out how to mess with the proxy setting for vite, but I can't find a single decent documentation around it. I want to redirect '/' to 'http://localhost:8000/api', but there's really weird behavior going on. If I have a route on localhost:8000/api, I can do:

//vite.config.js
export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [vue()],
    server: {
        proxy: {
            //Focus here
            '/api': {
                target: 'http://localhost:8000',
                changeOrigin: true,
                rewrite: (path) => { console.log(path); return path.replace('/^\/api/', '') }
            }
        }
    }
})

//todo-component.vue
export default {
    data() {
        return {
            todos: []
        }
    },
    components: {
        TodoElement
    },
    beforeCreate() {
                       //Focus here as well 
        this.axios.get('/api').then((response) => {
            this.todos = response.data
        })
            .catch((e) => {
                console.error(e)
            })
    }

}

This will return the json response as expected. However, if I try to make it so that '/' routes to 'localhost:8000/api/', like this:

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [vue()],
    server: {
        proxy: {
            //change here
            '/': {
                target: 'http://localhost:8000/api',
                changeOrigin: true,
                rewrite: (path) => { console.log(path); return path.replace('/^\/api/', '') }
            }
        }
    }
})

import TodoElement from "./todo-element.vue"
export default {
    data() {
        return {
            todos: []
        }
    },
    components: {
        TodoElement
    },
    beforeCreate() {
        //change here
        this.axios.get('/').then((response) => {
            this.todos = response.data
        })
            .catch((e) => {
                console.error(e)
            })
    }

}

It just spews out the html version of the api view, but with no styling, with a bunch of errors

No idea what to do. If someone could explain how this proxy works, i'd really love it. I don't want to keep writing "api/", and it'd be really valuable if I can manage to understand how this works.