the archives, tags and categories didn't display on a nginx server

[josephzjw]

When I use pelican -l in the localhost everything is okay, but when I publish the output to the nginx server it shows 404 not found error. Other pages are correct. I found that all the archives, tags and categories are directories in the output file. Their names are archive, tag and category. Is it mismatched with the name that cause the problem?

When I switch to another theme with tag and archive available, everything is okay... So I guess the problem is not my configuration of nginx server...

[talha131]

@josephzjw You will have to provide source code of your blog along with the configuration file so that we can test and try to reproduce the issue at our end.

But first, we had a similar issue sometime ago. Please go through it and see if it helps.

#250

[josephzjw]

It works when I followed the instructions you provided #250 Thanks!
By the way, why at localhost I don't need to specify the archives, tags and categories url and they still work correctly....

[talha131]

I followed the instructions you provided

@josephzjw hmm, can you please write here what worked for you. We may need to add it to documentation.

[josephzjw]

I followed the solution of azzamsa, add the three line codes below at the pelicanconf.py

TAGS_URL = 'tags.html'
CATEGORIES_URL = 'categories.html'
ARCHIVES_URL = 'archives.html'

Then I use pelican to generate the website and type service nginx reload to reload the nginx service. Finally it works...

[talha131]

Thank you @josephzjw We will look into it in detail. According to my understanding Elegant should have worked out of the box. We will either fix our code or update our documentation.

[crabdancing]

I can confirm this issue. The reason it happens is because the nav bar is rendered with links pointing to e.g. site.com/archives instead of site.com/archives.html -- I'm not sure if other servers automatically add a .html for blank queries, but nginx does not do this -- and it results in a 404.

To fix this, I just added an explicit .html to each URL generator in base.html:

<li {% if page_name == 'categories' %} class="active"{% endif %}><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ CATEGORIES_URL|default('categories.html') }}">Categories</a></li>
<li {% if page_name == 'tags' %} class="active"{% endif %}><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ TAGS_URL|default('tags.html') }}">Tags</a></li>
<li {% if page_name == 'archives' %} class="active"{% endif %}><a href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ ARCHIVES_URL|default('archives.html') }}">Archives</a></li>

You should be able to do the same in a commit and get it working on nginx without interfering with functionality on other servers, I believe.

Edit: I went ahead and made a pull request. Hope it's useful! :)

Edit 2: looks like although my pull request fixes the problem with the menu buttons, there are still broken links elsewhere. For instance all posts under Home has another instance of default('archives') that needs to be changed. Darn. Sorry I missed that.

[astraindev]

This issue doesn't affect just Nginx and josephzjw's fix, above, shouldn't be needed because the templates give the wrong default values. alxpettit's fix does work but more files need to be changed than just base.html.

To generate the issue:

Try twistd -on web --path=output on any Pelican website with the Elegant theme (from master or next branch) and the URLs generated will fail.

If you look at the source code, you see code like this:

<a class="category-link" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ CATEGORIES_URL|default('categories') }}#{{ category.slug }}-ref">{{ article.category }}</a>

The problem is in the default('categories') part of the code. Pelican, by default, generates 'categories.html', not 'categories'. When using the pelican -l command as a web server, the wrong default works because the web server adds .html to the URL that isn't found. That is, you can have both http://localhost:8000/index and http://localhost:800/index.html and the Pelican web server will pull up the same file. Other web servers, like Nginx, twistd -on web --path=output, Apache, etc., don't do that by default and can not find http://localhost:8000/index at all.

This Diff is how I fixed the problem in the template code of the Elegant theme.

elegant.diff.txt

[talha131]

Thank you @andrewdstrain. I will look into it in detail and get back to you.

[talha131]

I have fixed this issue in here

#480

It's available on the next branch. It will release to master in couple of days.

@andrewdstrain I am specially thankful to you for explaining the issue in detail. If you greatly appreciate if you can manage sometime to review my fix. This is the commit which fixes the issue 3c7df6a

[talha131]

@all-contributors please add @josephzjw for bug

[allcontributors]

@talha131

I've put up a pull request to add @josephzjw! 🎉

[talha131]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 4.0.0 🎉

The release is available on GitHub release

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