Serve noindex homepage copy at /-/

[simonw]

Sites like https://datasette.io/ and https://til.simonwillison.net/ run Datasette but with a custom template for the homepage. This makes them a little harder to use because there’s nowhere to go for the list of databases (I use /-/databases for that sometimes but it’s not very pretty).

Solution: serve a copy of the homepage at /-/ but put a <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> on it to avoid it being accidentally indexed as duplicate content.

I’ll have /- redirect to /-/ too.

[simonw]

Documentation can go here: https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/pages.html#top-level-index

[simonw]

I just realized that dropping a index.html page in to customize / will also affect /-/ unless I do something special to ensure only the base template is used there.

[simonw]

Docs are now live here: https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/pages.html#top-level-index

The index page can also be accessed at /-/, useful for if the default index page has been replaced using an index.html custom template. The /-/ page will always render the default Datasette index.html template.

[simonw]

datasette/datasette/views/index.py

Lines 155 to 157 in 9306766

	alternative_homepage = request.path == "/-/"
	return await self.render(
	["default:index.html" if alternative_homepage else "index.html"],

There's an edge-case here: if the user has Datasette running at an alternative prefix using base_url I don't think this will work. I'll fix that if anyone ever complains about it!