Option to allow URLs that contain a dot (.) to be rewritten

[fixpunkt]

Hi there,

I've got a use case that is a little different:

My view URLs may actually contain dots as part of the URL (because I pass quoted URLs as a path parameter). For this to work I'd need the following:

• a config option that disables the rule "don't rewrite if route contains a dot"
• the content of Add ability to specify paths to ignore #22 to be merged

Would you be willing to consider this use case?

Cheers,

Jannik

[fixpunkt]

Seems to be kind of a duplicate of #17. I'm leaving this open for now to document that more than one person actually has a need for this feature, but feel free to close if you think it's too esoteric.

I'll resort to hacking my own middleware for now.

[bripkens]

@fixpunkt: This topic has come up multiple times now. So I'd inclined to solve it with this middleware. Would #22 solve your use case with a few changes? I am thinking about merging #22 and changing the contents of the ignorePaths array to be a regex.

If this solves your use case, I'll merge and release this asap.

[fixpunkt]

Unfortunately, #22 only fixes part of the problem. I would also need a config option rewriteDots that disables this code path:

if (parsedUrl.pathname.indexOf('.') !== -1) {
  logger(
    'Not rewriting',
    req.method,
    req.url,
    'because the path includes a dot (.) character.'
  );
  return next();
}

#22 is required to alleviate the fallout of this: If I disable the "don't rewrite paths that contain dots" rule, I have no way to continue serving my static assets, so I'll have to add ignorePaths: ['/assets/'] as enabled by #22.

[bripkens]

That sounds pretty complicated @fixpunkt. Is there no way for you to make use of the rewrites rule?

https://github.com/bripkens/connect-history-api-fallback#rewrites

[fixpunkt]

Yeah, maybe something like {from: /^!(\/assets\/)/, to: '/index.html'} might work, but at that point this middleware gets kind of redundant.

I've ended up building a 3-line koa middleware that does this to solve my problem yesterday, so yeah, I guess we can close this issue. Thanks for your help!

[domenkozar]

What is the best way of dealing with this? It's a really annoying behavior, some of my URLS include a dot because it's a valid URL character.

I'd like to understand better why . is considered a special case, doesn't file get first requested if this actually exist and only then fallback is used?

[bripkens]

@domenkozar: Since this has been request a bunch of times now, I added an option to disable the . rule. See the readme:

https://github.com/bripkens/connect-history-api-fallback#disabledotrule

The feature has been released as version 1.3.0 to NPM. Please let me know whether this solves your problem.

[domenkozar]

@bripkens thanks! I wonder why dotrule is even needed? Shouldn't filesystem be accessed first and then fallback would go to history api?

[bripkens]

Shouldn't filesystem be accessed first and then fallback would go to history api?

In a perfect world, yes. Unfortunately, there are very many ways where this gets complicated:

• What is the root directory for filesystem access?
• Is filesystem access permitted for this user?
• Is the file served in some kind of special way, e.g. by transformation from a template?
• …

On top of all this, the dot rule has been part of this middleware since day 1 (worked perfect for my use case at that time) and I don't want to change the middleware's default settings (and by that upset other users for which this also works fine).

[bripkens]

Closing since this is implemented now.