Relative links to index.html are absolute

#1

Hi all,

I’m trying to migrate a site to v4, but seem to have hit a dealbreaker with relative links when the target is called index.html, since it that case the links become absolute. For example, in code/index.html.erb I have

<%= link_to 'text', '/index.html', :relative => true %>

In the rendered code I would expect

 <a href="../index.html">text</a>

or

<a href="../">text</a>

but I actually get

<a href="/index.html">text</a>

I get the expected behaviour if the target of the link is called anything but index.html, bizarre!

Am I missing something here?

Thanks in advance!

Jim

1 Like
#2

Did you ever figure this out?

I’m getting the same thing with <%= link_to 'Home', '/' %>.

I’ve tried adding the relative: true option to the link_to, and also as a global configuration in config.rb

#3

I never did, and it’s a deal breaker for me, so I’ll not be upgrading to 4 (and will eventually move to Jekyll I guess).

1 Like
#4

I’m not actually using relative links, so maybe this is way off-base but I would expect relative links to get confused if your link starts with a slash (e.g. /mypage.html) because that is an absolute path.

I don’t have a site with relative links going right now so I can’t try but maybe that helps. Also, I’d suggest elaborating on which pages you are trying to link between because it is a bit unclear from the posts in this thread.

@mehulkar Again, I’m not using relative links but in my navbar when I want to link back to the home page I use <%= link_to 'Home', '/index.html' %> . Since it seems like you are trying to link to your Home it seems like this is more appropriate than a relative link.

@jjgreen If you are trying to link to the index one directory up (as you indicate in your expected anchor tag), then I would think that this might do the trick: <%= link_to 'text', '../index.html', :relative => true %>. Again, can’t confirm this.

#5

Hi @ericpowell

According to the docs the link_to helper uses a relative URL if the argument is absolute and the :relative => true option is given, “[unless it] fails to determine which page the URL provided belongs to”. It seems that this is the case for the absolute paths /index.html and /, although I’m not sure I can see why those particular paths would be a problem.

In my case using an absolute path is not an option, since I build the site locally and upload it to a server where it is not at the URL root location. I don’t want to hard-code links as relative, since then, whenever I move a page I will break all of the links in that page. Middleman v3 handles this conversion of absolute to relative without issue, v4 does not.

#6

Still not sure about the relative link situation but since you say your motivation for relative links is because your URL is not root on the server, perhaps the :http_prefix option could be of use.

This is what I am using on my home server. I have this snippet in my config.rb:

configure :build do
  set :http_prefix, '/demo/mysite/build/'
  ...
  ...
end

Then I access the site through localhost/demo/mysite/build instead of just localhost. Hope I understood your issue correctly.