baseURL = mysite.com/test causes wrong menu links like mysite.com/test/test/about

support
1

Hi,

I am a Hugo newbie, so apologies if the cause of the below is obvious to you, but I cannot seem to make a baseURL work if it contains more than just the domain, e.g. https://mysite.com/test. For some reason, the links to content contain the “test” dir twice, like e.g. https://mysite.com/test/test/about/.

I already searched through the docs and the forum but without a result.

What I have in config.toml:

baseurl = "https://mysite.com/test"

[[menu.main]]
		name= "About"
		url = "/about/"

All other relevant settings should be pretty much default. (E.g. I did not set canonifyurl etc.)
And in content/ there is an about.md file. Nothing unusual so far.

Now if I run Hugo (v0.15) to generate the site into $PUBLIC_WWW/test…

hugo -d $HOME/html/test

…and point a browser to https://mysite.com/test, the home page loads fine but the link to the about page looks like this:

https://mysite.com/test/test/about/

The theme I use is Hype-X.

Did I overlook something obvious? How can I make this setup work?

Thanks,
Christoph

1 Like
2

This looks strange; you can try to add server-relative URL in the menu config “/test/about”, but other than that I would suggest you try the Hugo source version. We should really, really release a new version soon. A lot have happened since 0.15.

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3

Thanks for this suggestion, it made indeed a difference. Now the menus (about etc.) work fine, but the links that worked previously (like CSS links etc.) now have no test/ part at all, just as if they ignore the baseURL. (All those links, as far as I checked them, are of the form {{ "/css/poole.css" | absURL }}. Strangely enough, the menu links use the same format: {{ .URL | absURL }}. (Note this template code is from the Hyde-X templates - I assume this theme has been used and tested since quite a while now.)

This is what I observe with v0.16-DEV:

Menu links work now (from layouts/partial/sidebar.html). Their template uses this format:

{{ .URL | absURL }}

The “Home” link doesn’t work (also located in sidebar.html). The template format is similar:

{ "/" | absURL }}

CSS links fail, too (in head.html) - same template format:

{{ "/css/poole.css" | absURL }}

When I remove the leading slashes, the Home link and the CSS links start working:

{{ "" | absURL }}

and

{{ "css/poole.css" | absURL }}

respectively.

I also noticed that image tags from the Markdown source of a blog post do not seem to get processed properly. Of the following image tags, only the last one works:

![image](gopher.png "Gopher")  <-- fails

![image](post/gopher.png "Gopher") <-- fails

![image](/post/gopher.png "Gopher") <-- fails

![image](test/post/gopher.png "Gopher") <-- fails

![image](/test/post/gopher.png "Gopher") <-- works

Because of the baseURL setting (“https://mysite.com/test”) I should not need to use “/test/” at all in the image path.

All of this is quite confusing. I only want to live-test on a real server without exposing the site to the public yet. With local hugo server (which ignores the baseURL) everything works like a charm.

Is there any other approach for testing a site from within a subdirectory, without breaking half of the links?

Thanks,
Christoph

4

I finally found a workaround to the issue:

Use a subdomain.

It seems as long as the baseURL does not point to any subdirectory, everything works well.

5

The absURL function only converts relative paths. If you pass in a string that starts with http or /, absURL doesn’t prepend the baseURL. We should update the docs to explain this behavior.

The image tags in your Markdown are a bit of a special case. The blackfriday package renders that content without Hugo processing the URLs/paths. Hugo’s baseURL capabilities come into play only in the layouts. If you want to use absURL from within your content, you’ll need to create a shortcode for that. For example:

![image]({{< absurl post/gopher.png >}} "Gopher")
1 Like
6

After looking at the code, I need to correct my last post.

That should be: If you pass in a string that starts with http or //, absURL doesn’t prepend the baseURL. Note the double slash.

absURL does prepend the baseURL if you pass in a path starting with /, but it removes any path in the baseURL before doing so. So, instead of prepending https://mysite.com/test, it prepends https://mysite.com.

I don’t know where all this function is being used inside of Hugo, but it is confusing.

7

In my tests the baseURL always got prepended, just not always with the correct result. If absURL ignores strings that start with /, then there must be some other mechanism that also builds a full URL from the snippets in the layouts (and fails when the baseURL points to a subdir).

Anyway, after switching from subdir to subdomain, I have not seen these problems anymore.

Thanks,
Christoph

8

Don’t know, but maybe the absURL is not used in your layout, there is another way to get a full path:

<link href="{{ .Site.BaseURL }}favicon.png" rel="shortcut icon">

These different ways of creating a full path may be a reason that it is working sometimes…

9

Thanks for the hint, I’ll keep this in mind in case I build my own layout. Right now I use Hype-X which works fine so far. I only tweak the visual appearance a bit, that’s enough for me until I get more familar with Hugo theming.

10

I found this old topic when I tried to solve an issue where absURL suddenly was not working after upgrading Hugo from version 0.15 to 0.17. In v0.15 you could use / in absURL like this: href="{{ "/css/highlight/" | absURL }}default.css" but now in v0.17 I had to remove the first /: href="{{ "css/highlight/" | absURL }}default.css". to make it work.

I have not seen any documentation that it’s behaviour has changed.

Anyway good to find a solution!

1 Like