Serving static files

[giuliohome]

What kind of documentation problem are you reporting?

Unclear Docs

Where is the issue found?

https://api.rocket.rs/v0.5/rocket/fs/struct.FileServer#relative-paths

What's wrong?

I encountered an issue serving a static HTML template after deploying it with Docker containerization and I think that the documentation is a bit unclear.

Let me quote it first

In the example above, /static is an absolute path. If your static files are stored relative to your crate and your project is managed by Rocket, use the relative! macro to obtain a path that is relative to your crate’s root.

Actually relative!("static") seems to produce an absolute path out of the relative one, so finally I had to omit the relative! even though it was counter-intuitive.

System Checks

• I confirmed that the issue still exists on master on GitHub.
• I was unable to find a previous report of this problem.

[giuliohome]

As I noted here, this comment of @blackghost1987 should be included in the documentation:

The relative! macro has a confusing name. If you want your binary to find the static dir relative to your binary (so you can deploy it anywhere) then you should get rid of relative!, because it would bake in the absolute path. Just use something like FileServer::from("static"), it should work fine.

[Rumengol]

I second this, compiling a host-specific absolute path is very confusing when using a macro named relative.