Zola creates a link that goes nowhere (linkchecker doesn't complain)

[jonas-schievink]

Bug Report

Environment

Zola version: 0.5.1

Expected Behavior

Both links should link to the respective blog post, or both of them should be detected as invalid by the linkchecker.

Current Behavior

One of the links works fine, the other one links to a page that doesn't exist.

Step to reproduce

• Clone this repo and run zola serve: https://github.com/jonas-schievink/zolarepro
• Go to http://127.0.0.1:1111 - You'll see 2 posts, "Post 1" and "Post 2"
• Click on "Post 1". It contains a link to the second post at http://127.0.0.1:1111/post/002-second, which works fine.
• Go to "Post 2" by clicking the link. Post 2 contains a link back to the first post, but which has a wrong URL: http://127.0.0.1:1111/001-first.

The markdown in "Post 1" is [The next part](../002-second).

The markdown in "Post 2" is [previous post](../001-first).

Both should be correct, but zola seems to render only one of them wrongly?

[Keats]

That looks like it's done by the markdown parser itself, very weird. This might be linked to #561 for some reason?

To use relative links in Zola, use the [previous post](./post/001-first/index.md) form and the links will be checked for existence as well.

[jonas-schievink]

Hmm, apparently what we're doing is working fine on our staging and production environment, only a local zola serve is creating the bad link (this is just using the ../001-first syntax).

Even when I do zola build -u http://127.0.0.1:8000/, followed by cd public; python -m http.server brings up a working website, so this is purely a zola serve issue???

[Keats]

Just to be clear, the link checker only checks external links (http) and internal when they start by ./. The fact they do link to different places is a bug though

[Keats]

The links are not even touched by Zola actually. If you look at the generated HTML, they are still ../blabla.
So it is as you say, probably caused by the actix webserver in serve

[jonas-schievink]

Just to be clear, the link checker only checks external links (http) and internal when they start by ./.

Interesting, why is that? Is there a way to raise an error when a link isn't getting checked by zola? I'd like to prevent dead links in all cases.

[Keats]

Interesting, why is that? Is there a way to raise an error when a link isn't getting checked by zola? I'd like to prevent dead links in all cases.

Mostly because I didn't think of relative links and that it makes more sense imo to refer to the markdown files for links between content and that makes it clear it isn't an actual markdown feature.

[jonas-schievink]

To use relative links in Zola, use the previous post form and the links will be checked for existence as well.

Indeed that seems to work - it feels wrong though, since the path doesn't start at the current directory (./). I guess this would be solved automatically if all links are checked for existence, since then I can use whatever format I want.

[pcwizz]

Just tried to replicate this bug. I observed that the link previous/next post links are incorrect when navigated to directly. When navigated to from the root the links in both posts are rendered correctly. When when navigating from one post to to another the link is incorrect.

I suspect zola serve is failing to pass on the correct context somewhere. I'm not at all familiar with the zola code base but this is a good excuse to become more familiar. I'll have a go tracing and fixing this issue.

[pcwizz]

The problem is essentially that zola serve does not redirect (301) links to directories to include the trailing / as many web servers do by default.

I think it is reasonable to expect this redirection behavior in zola serve as it lines up with common production environments. I will therefore prepare a PR implementing this redirection.

[Keats]

@pcwizz is it coming along? actix-web got a 1.0 release that changed the usage a lot as well :/

[Keats]

That seems fixed with the latest Zola that is using hyper, at least the repro repo works fine now.