I'm building an SPA using with React and Node.js on Kubernetes. I have separate services and ingresses for the front-end and back-end services. I've seen people also use Nginx to serve the React build, but I found that doing below works well.

# Dockerfile.production
FROM node:8.7.0-alpine
RUN mkdir -p /usr/app/client
WORKDIR /usr/app/client
COPY package*.json /usr/app/client/
RUN npm install
RUN npm install -g serve
COPY . /usr/app/client
EXPOSE 3000
RUN npm run build
CMD ["serve", "-s", "build", "-l", "3000" ]

Alternatively, I could serve the build with Nginx like the following. This seems like "the right way" to do it, but I'm unsure what the advantage is over using the serve npm package, though it does feel very hacky to me. It seems like everything that could be configured with Nginx to serve the app could also be done in the Ingress, right?

server {
    server_name example.com;
    ...

    location ~ / {
        root /var/www/example.com/static;
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }
}