Erroneous redirects appearing for static files.

[hugo]

My chrome dev tools are being flooded with 302 redirects for static files, as Ghost is adding a trailing slash to them. I understand that it has been decided that elsewhere in Ghost the forced addition of trailing slashes is the desired behaviour (i.e. /ghost/ not /ghost), but I doubt this is desired behaviour.

p.s. sorry to bang on about trailing slashes, I know it's a minor thing but I had a big debate about them over the weekend so it's a hot/fresh topic in my mind.

[ErisDS]

I'm not sure why you're getting these 302s - the fact you're getting these is the problem that needs investigating, rather than the trailing slashes. The way Ghost is set up, static files should be served before the trailing slashes are added.

Often what we see is that a file isn't served by the static middleware, and gets a slash added to it before it's served up by the 404 error handling middleware at the very end.

Have you made changes to the middleware, and have you run all the grunt commands etc?

[hugo]

Looks like the Grunt command failed for me. I'll add a screencast showing what I see as a result though, because it could definitely be improved.

[halfdan]

#935 might be related

[aranw]

Am getting a similar issue and its resulting in being unable to setup Ghost.

When I try access /ghost/signup.

[ErisDS]

If you're running in development mode, then you need to run 'grunt init' otherwise if you're in production mode, you need to run 'grunt prod'
See https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#installation--setup-instructions

[aranw]

I ended up getting this going, bit disappointed that it took me so long the instructions seem very fragmented and don't actually state all the requirements, I was missing Sass and Bourbon and it didn't actually tell me that they were missing properly.

[ErisDS]

We've listed out all the requirements in the contributing file. https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#working-on-ghost-core

If you have a better way to do it, please submit a PR!

[hugo]

Sorry I didn't follow up on this as promised - one of our guys decided to infect the network with a particularly nasty virus, and as I'm the IT guy as well as developer, I had to deal with that...

Anyway, here's the rub:, when you are missing static file, you get a 302 then a 200, the body text of which is the 404 text. In my opinion, there needs to be an intercept in the static files path that 404s properly when the files are missing, rather than simply "passing the buck" down (up?) the middleware chain.

Further, because it's a Backbone app, a lack of JavaScript means you just get a blank page currently. Could Ghost at least throw up a message to the effect of "Ghost requires JavaScript be loaded to run, either these files didn't load, or you are blocking scripts intentionally" so the problem is clearly stated to the end user?

[aranw]

@ErisDS I think the issue was I was following the README file and the docs.ghost.org pages, which don't list the requirements and don't show how to setup your environment with these tools which are required, the docs on docs.ghost.org show install node, which is what I followed, thinking thats all I needed whereas what a user would of expected is a guide on setting up grunt, sass and bourbon. Which is a very important step in deploying Ghost IMO.

[aranw]

@thisishugo I agree with you here, the blank page was very confusing and didn't really explain to me the files were actually missing. Missing files should respond with 404s not 304s, 304s imply the file has been moved.

[ErisDS]

@aranw The README states that there are 2 ways to get started, and points to the Contributor docs for instructions for how to setup from git. I do not know how to make this any clearer than it is. Suggestions welcome.

With regards to the response message being wrong, that is being dealt with in #1152

The idea to add a message to make it clear that the JavaScript has not loaded is reasonable, perhaps someone would like to open that as an issue?

[hugo]

@ErisDS To the first, aside from making the process more automatic, nothing, and that's a difficult task. To the second, excellent. To the last, done.