[Bug] self hosting under a sub path not working

[terrytw]

What problem is solved by the new feature When self hosting, I want to use mydomain.example.com/pairdrop instead of pairdrop.example.com. It is easier to manage in terms of DNS and domain name.

Describe the feature A lot of self hosted project allow to set a "baseurl" variable to achieve this, otherwise reverse proxy is going to break.

[schlagmichdoch]

As of my knowledge all paths are already relative as to make serving under a subdirectory possible. Is this not the case? At what point does it break for you? Does PairDrop not load at all? Does your browser log show any error?

[terrytw]

My apologies, since you are so certain, I went back to double check all my settings, then I found that I was missing a / at the end of url.

I was using https://mydomain.com/pairdrop instead of https://mydomain.com/pairdrop/, so the website is not loading assets correctly.

I have also added a rule in my reverse proxy to redirect https://mydomain.com/pairdrop to https://mydomain.com/pairdrop/. Now everything works flawlessly.

[schlagmichdoch]

No worries! Great that you got it working!

It is not ideal though, if it does not work out of the box. We could detect via JS if PairDrop is hosted under a path different than / and change the asset paths accordingly. I’ll reopen this and try to find out if it’s easily doable :)

[schlagmichdoch]

So I had another look at hosting PairDrop under a path and I think your solution is the best way to go.

If we use a subpath we actually point to a subdirectory. When not serving in a subdirectory but on root, we do point to a directory as well (/). Reverse proxies like Nginx or Apache then automatically serve files like index.html inside of the specified directory. So I think pointing to the directory like so https://mydomain.com/pairdrop/ is correct.

Otherwise all relative paths would be broken. /pairdrop: images/logo.png is converted as /images/logo.png

*: Actually I found out that /index.html perfectly served the PairDrop instance as well as /. As I only wanted one URL https://pairdrop.net to be valid, I tried to redirect /index.html to /. At first, I ended up in a redirection loop as / is equivalent to /index.html for nginx which redirects to / again and again until the browser throws an error. I solved it in the end by adding the following bit to the nginx conf:

server  {
    (...)
    if ( $request_uri ~ "/index.html" ) {
        rewrite ^ / permanent;
    }
    (...)
}

So anyone who serves PairDrop under a sub path should simply serve it the subdirectory like so: /pairdrop/