I'm trying to send a simple get request to my express backend at the mywebsite.com/test route. The server should respond with {"test": "test"}. This works fine in development on localhost, but no matter what I try in a production environment I can't get a response back from my server. I'm hosting this website on a GoDaddy VPS with CentOS 7. The react app loads just fine on live, but any requests I make return a html document with a tag saying "You need to enable JavaScript to run this app". (I'm seeing this in the response section of the network tab in chrome devtools)

I've run the backend with node from ssh and it says its listening on port 5000. I have added a proxy to package.json, as well as a homepage as such:

  "proxy": "http://localhost:5000",
  "homepage": "."

I've tried having the homepage field be http://mywebsite.com as well with no results.

Here is my express app setup:

const express = require('express');
const PORT = process.env.PORT || 5000;
const app = express();
app.use(express.json());

app.get('/', function(req, res) {
   res.status(200).send()
});

app.get('/test', (req, res) => {
    res.status(200).json({test: "test"});
})

app.listen(PORT, async function() {
    console.log(`Listening on Port ${PORT}`);
});

In development I receive this in the network tab as expected:

{"test":"test"}

I'm at a complete loss at this point, it feels like I've tried everything.