Follow symbolic link directories

[getreu]

Gutenberg follows symbolic links to files already, but not yet symbolic links to directories.
This feature would be very handy, because then you could just link assets under /static wherever they live. The same reasoning applies to /content and the other directories,

[Keats]

I can see the point for the static folder but I'm not sure I see it for content. When would you have gutenberg md files used outside of the content folder?

[getreu]

A useful consistent policy could be:

1. All absolute and relative symbolic links (dirs and files) referencing assets outside the Gutenberg tree are followed: The referenced assets are copied into /public/.
2. All relative symbolic links (dirs and files in /content or /static) referencing assets inside /content or /static not followed. The relative symbolic links are copied as they are into /public. They will be followed later by the Web-server, when the web page is accessed.

Advantages and use case:

1. This feature would be very handy, because then you could just link assets under /static wherever they actually live. The same reasoning applies to /content and the other directories. Use case: documentation and blog content is kept in each project folder and are linked into the Gutenberg tree with symbolic folders. No need to copy assets from outside into /content and /static before launching gutenberg.
2. Internal symbolic links are useful to avoid redundancy when you have identical content on different pages.

The most important is to implement 1) the "follow links behaviour" for symbolic directory links (for files it works already).

No 2) is a nice to have

[getreu]

BTW: I am using a script to assemble assets to be published dynamically using symbolic directory links. If you are interested how it works see 1.3 in A collection of Bash scripts - bash-scripts.pdf.

[Keats]

@getreu are you willing to work on a PR to add that?

[getreu]

@Keats : I would like to and had a look into your code by curiousity (knowing that I do not have any free resources until the end of the year). I like the way you modulerized your code base.
Concerning the work load for a PR on this:
(Policy 1): you follow symbolic file links already, following symbolic directory links should be straightforward: 2-3 lines of code
(Policy 2): To decide if a symbolic link points inside the "path" tree and - if it does - create the same relative symbolic link in ./public/ is not very complicated either (special case here is Windows OS): 2-3 lines of code.
More work is to enhance test-site and to add some appropriate tests.

Nevertheless, my workload does not allow me to accept any additional project now. Sorry.

[2mol]

I can see the point for the static folder but I'm not sure I see it for content. When would you have gutenberg md files used outside of the content folder?

I just came across this because I wanted to know if zola serve could watch files for changes that are symlinked. The site builds fine, but changes in the symlinked file don't trigger a rebuild.

To answer your question: I like to manage my writing in a central location, and it becomes messy when I duplicate blog posts etc. So I'd love to be able to just symlink individual .md files into content/.

[bemyak]

Both initial building and watching for changes already work on master brunch, so the issue can be closed I suppose.

[getreu]

follow up here in zola.discourse
As a follow up of hard_link_static = true which is a huge improvement for my setup. Thank you.
It allows me to publish a whole site without copying any content:

• Assemble the static content with symbolic links to selected directories in you project.
• Reconstruct the tree with hard links to files as leaves in static.

For the latter I use the attached script.
Here my suggestion: include the scripts functionality in Zola.

#!/bin/sh
# FROM_DIR must be in the same directory where `config.toml` is.
FROM_DIR="blog3/static-symlinks"

cd "$FROM_DIR"
# create directories
find -L -type d -not -name . -exec mkdir -p "../static/{}" \;
# populate them with hard links
find -L -type f -not -name . -exec ln -L "{}" "../static/{}" \;

[pinpox]

Does zola serve still work with symbolic links as static assets? I get 404 when trying to load assets that are a symlink inside the ./static directory

[bemyak]

@pinpox, it was broken in 0.15 but should be fixed in 0.16. Can you check it, please?

[pinpox]

@pinpox, it was broken in 0.15 but should be fixed in 0.16. Can you check it, please?

My bad, didn't notice I'm running zola 0.15.3. I'll update the package for my distribution then and report back!
EDIT: Update is submitted here