Different behaviour between "hugo" & "hugo server" for baseURL

[divinerites]

What version of Hugo are you using (hugo version)?

$ hugo version
Hugo Static Site Generator v0.72.0/extended darwin/amd64 BuildDate: unknown

Does this issue reproduce with the latest release?

yes

I just noticed that I had a different behaviour between hugo server and hugo when it comes to (I think) multi-language and trailing /.

So i created a minimal repo (https://github.com/divinerites/mytest) where you can see it happening. I also commited the /public folder so you can also see the problem on the generated HTML.

• my baseURL is : baseURL = "https://www.mysite.org"
• there is one section highres in 3 languages.
• When you run hugo server it works fine. You can click and link to all my pages and translations.

The line showing this problem is :@

{{ .Lang }} : <a href="{{ site.BaseURL | absURL }}{{ .Lang }}">{{ site.BaseURL | absURL }}{{ .Lang }}</a><br>

In this (right) "live server" generated code you can see that i get a / after the absURL.

en : <a href="http://localhost:1313/en">http://localhost:1313/en</a><br>
nl : <a href="http://localhost:1313/nl">http://localhost:1313/nl</a><br>

When I generate the HTML using just hugo, the / after the absURL is not generated

This comes from the public folder :

en : <a href="https://www.mysite.orgen">https://www.mysite.orgen</a><br>
nl : <a href="https://www.mysite.orgnl">https://www.mysite.orgnl</a><br>

I have this live on one of my site for this specific code.
All the remaining (complex) code works fine.

For the record this is my real code :

<a class="btn btn-main" href="{{ .Site.GetPage "section" "highres" | relLangURL }}highres/">{{ i18n "highres" }} <i class="tf-ion-android-open"></i></a>

[divinerites]

I just tested with the dev version who takes care of this (#7357) but same behavior.

[khayyamsaleem]

yep. not just trailing slash as well; if you have a baseURL like http://abc.com/test/, only /test is retained in the baseURL.

[divinerites]

yep. not just trailing slash as well; if you have a baseURL like abc.com/test/, only /test is retained in the baseURL.

I do not see this behaviour (0.72.0). i get abc.com/test (and the original problem of course)

hugo server :

en : <a href="http://localhost:1313/test/en">http://localhost:1313/test/en</a><br>

hugo :

en : <a href="https://www.mysite.org/testen">https://www.mysite.org/testen</a><br>

[khayyamsaleem]

@divinerites correct, i was mistaken.

[divinerites]

And to be clear, the point is not "do I have a trailing / or not on baseURL or relLangURL", whatever rule is fine by me. I remember some talk/change (?) about this some months ago.

But why do we have a different behaviour between hugo server and hugo, so I think is a non expected behaviour.

[jmooring]

Simple example:

{{ warnf "%s" site.BaseURL }}

Then run:

hugo        --baseURL http://example.org/docs   --> http://example.org/docs
hugo server --baseURL http://example.org/docs   --> http://example.org:1313/docs/  # trailing slash

This behavior has been around for years, at least as far back as v0.54.0, and probably much earlier.

Avoid this by always including a trailing slash in site configuration. Per the docs:

baseURL

The absolute URL (protocol, host, path, and trailing slash) of your published site (e.g., https://www.example.org/docs/).

I wish site.BaseURL wasn't exposed to the templates (this approach is fragile), but that ship sailed a long time ago. Site and theme authors should be using absURL and absLangURL instead, or using .GetPage / resources.Get / .ResourcesGet and then reference the .Permalink value.

Adding a trailing slash, if missing, when running hugo will cause undesirable side effects for some sites.

Removing the trailing slash when running hugo server seems like a better idea, but that may break some stuff too.

[bep]

wish site.BaseURL wasn't exposed to the templates

I agree, but once we get a grip of what is the actual API and generate reference docs from it, we can at least start by hiding stuff that should not be exposed in the first place, e.g. baseURL.

[jmooring]

Closing as duplicate of #11669.

[github-actions]

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