custom.js is not delivered if files are hosted within symlink.

Steltek · 2025-04-27T20:21:51+00:00

Scenario: Web root is at "/var/www/html" files.gallery is hosted at "/sites/files" "/sites/files" is served as "/files" by the webserver through a symlink in...

Steltek

Scenario:

Web root is at "/var/www/html"
files.gallery is hosted at "/sites/files"
"/sites/files" is served as "/files" by the webserver through a symlink in "/var/www/html" called "files" which points to "/sites/files"

Issue:
Trying to use custom.js in this scenario fails. The file is never included in the files.gallery output.

Cause?
It appears that $src does not get set in the u::uinclude function.
The function refusing to set $src is Path::urlpath, which in turn relies on a call to self::is_within_docroot($path).
The root cause for the failure appears to be that is_within_docroot relies on a variable called Config::$document_root, which is set to "/var/www/html" and thus never matches the $path of the file which was determined to be "/sites/files/_files/js/custom.js".

None of the root or root_path variables appear to have any control over this (I've tried setting them to '/sites/files' and/or to "https://domain.tld/files" with no success). Config::$document root always points to /var/www/html, thus always failing the check to see if "custom.js" is in the webroot.

Am I overlooking a configuration option, or is this potentially a bug?

Karl

Steltek Web root is at "/var/www/html"
files.gallery is hosted at "/sites/files"

Just out of curiosity, why isn't your sites dir inside the web server document root? The intended purpose is to maintain your web files inside your servers document root. For example, a typical Linux server will have /var/www/website1/public and /var/www/website2/public, where each domains document root is the public dir. On my local web server (on my working laptop), I have assigned server document root to /Myname/sites, so everything inside sites is in the document root. Then, of course I can setup specific hostname files.test to point to /Myname/sites/files. Why not just assign your server document root to /sites if all your sites are there?

Steltek Issue:
Trying to use custom.js in this scenario fails. The file is never included in the files.gallery output.

Yes, I can imagine that would fail, because the CSS file is technically outside the servers document root. The main problem here, is how are we supposed to know the public web path to the CSS document if we can't calculate the path relative to the server document root? In the specific case of Files Gallery, we can probably "assume" that the file can be loaded relative to to index.php (since this file must be public), for example _files/custom/custom.css ... But this wouldn't work if someone has changed storage_path option for example.

I will look into it for next release ... The above is probably a solution, although it doesn't seem flexible.

Steltek

Karl

Just out of curiosity, why isn't your sites dir inside the web server document root?

Mostly for legacy reasons. The server started out with /var/www/html, and then that volume ran out of storage and /sites was created on a separate volume (different storage tier), without moving any of the existing data over.

But this wouldn't work if someone has changed storage_path option for example.

Most web-based solutions I've worked with make the user specify the "public root URL" for these cases, and then it's up to the user to ensure it resolves/is served by the server. (i.e. you'd have something like a storage_base_url option that overrides all checks and just makes the system spit out all paths relative to that.)

No big deal if there's no change, I just wanted to report my specific edge case and validate that I wasn't overlooking something. I've worked around the issue by simply patching the code to forcibly output the reference to the _files/js/custom.js file on line 2792:

echo ('<script src="_files/js/custom.js"></script>');

Karl

Steltek I will add a fix, as it should definitely be working when the files are public (although symlinked).

Sinceindex.php is always public, any files that are within the path of the dir that contains index.php must also be public, including relative dir _files/*. It must be possible to improve the logic.