Trailing Slash Guide

Have trailing slash problems after deploying a static website in production?

This repo explains factually the behavior of:

• Static Site generators
• Hosting Providers

We also suggest some possible solutions

Intro

Let's get more familiar with trailing slash issues.

Common problems:

• SEO/perf issues: when browsing /myPath, your host redirects to /myPath/
• 404 issues: relative link such as <a href="otherPath"> are resolved differently (/otherPath or /myPath/otherPath depending on the presence/absence of a trailing slash
• UX issues: your host adds a trailing slash, and later your single-page-application frontend router removes it, leading to a confusing experience and flickering url

Causes:

• static site generators can emit different files for the same path /myPath: /myPath.html or /myPath/index.html (the later can lead to an additional trailing slash)
• host providers all have a different behavior when serving static files, there is no standard

Summary

Considering this static site:

static
│
├── file.html
│
├── folder
│   └── index.html
│
├── both.html
└── both
    └── index.html

Behavior of various static hosting providers:

Help Wanted

Let's keep this resource up-to-date, and make it exhaustive together.