AngularJS URLs all of a sudden contain hashbang

Question

I've been developing an AngularJS app for the last month with angular v1.5.8 and angular-route v1.5.8 and node v 7.1.0 (with nvm). All of a sudden, my urls contain a hashbang and the routing isn't working so I can't change pages.

Instead of

http://localhost:8080/#/about when I first load the page, I get http://localhost:8080/#!/about

and when I try to change to http://localhost:8080/#/chat by clicking a <a href="#/chat"> I get http://127.0.0.1:3000/#!/about#%2Fchat.

Does anyone know why this is happening or what I might have changed to result in this new behavior? I've removed my node_modules and npm installed again and it still happens.

Relevant code is below

index.html

      <ul class="nav navbar-nav navbar-right">
        <li><a href="#/about">About</a></li>
        <li><a href="#/chat">Chat</a></li>
      </ul>

routes.js

angular.module('routes', ['ngRoute'])
.config(['$routeProvider', function($routeProvider){
  $routeProvider
    .when('/about', {
      templateUrl: 'views/about.html',
      controller: 'AboutController'
    })
    .when('/chat', {
      templateUrl: 'views/chat.html',
      controller: 'ChatController'
    })
    .otherwise({
      redirectTo: '/about'
    });
}]);

Answer 1

look at $locationProvider, its hashPrefix allows you to specify what you want to prefix your slash. if you want your code to work put the $locationProvider in your dependencies and enter the following

$locationProvider.hashPrefix('')

config(['$routeProvider', '$locationProvider', function($routeProvider, $locationProvider){
 $locationProvider.hashPrefix('')
  $routeProvider
    .when('/about', {
      templateUrl: 'views/about.html',
      controller: 'AboutController'
    })