Does Surfer support symbolic links?

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon could we get symlinks working in Surfer just for symlinks to other folders within Surfer itself (not to files in another app).

e.g. on library.uniteddiversity.coop I've got a /Cooperatives/ directory which I like having at the top level, but really it's just a symlink to /Money_and_Economics/Cooperatives/ but I don't seem to be able to have the same on Surfer.

[nebulon]

I think this should be possible. Which way did you even upload the symlink? Or was this done manually via the webterminal into the app instance?

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon first of all I was just dragging folders on my local machine between the mounted servers, but then I was getting errors like this:

Which is in part my I started trying to do us using rsync instead, but then couldn't actually work out how to get that working either...

[girish]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

I think this should be possible

Won't think be quite tricky? It has to be /app/data/public/... or something in the filesystem and this is not exposed to the user (in surfer).

[nebulon]

There are more than one areas here. For one having symlinks contained within /app/data/public which I think can be made to work, have to check if expressjs already has support for that with path checks.

Now if webdav supports creating symlinks I am not sure yet.

The cli tool nor the webinterface have support to create/update them also.

Given all that, I am not sure if symlinks are a huge use-case for surfer as such.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

Now if webdav supports creating symlinks I am not sure yet.

I think perhaps it doesn't

Out of interest I just tried Right-click -> Create link on my webdav mounted Nextcloud in Gnome file manager and got this:

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon if we can't get symlinks to work in Surfer, is there some way I can do a redirect from:

http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Cooperatives/*

to

http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/Cooperatives/*

Because I'd really rather not have lots of broken links (all the times I've linked to thinks in the /Cooperatives/ folder) out there

[robi]

I just did some testing with links and it's odd.

I made a dir called f2/ and put a file there.
visiting the site with ../f2 gives a 404

Seems listing directories are broken too.

open terminal and:
ln -s f2 f1 404
ln -s /app/data/public/f2 f1 404
ln -s /app/data/public/f2 /app/data/public/f0 404

So visiting /images/ & /assets/ 404

But index.html pulls files from those directories just fine.

[nebulon]

So besides the webdav issue, I am not actually sure what the symlink issue is.

At least in my tests symlinks (contained within the /app/data/public folder) created via the webterminal into the app work normally.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

At least in my tests symlinks (contained within the /app/data/public folder) created via the webterminal into the app work normally.

Great to hear, thanks, I'll give that a go!

[jdaviescoates]

@jdaviescoates said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

Great to hear, thanks, I'll give that a go!

Yep, worked fine!

I wonder why rsync wasn't able to create them (I guess perhaps because when it was trying to create the links the originals weren't there to link to yet - although still a bit odd that it gave errors saying symlinks not supported).

Now just need folder and file listings to be in the correct order and https://library2.uniteddiversity.coop/ will be good to go! Thanks!

[nebulon]

I will mark that as solved then, the filelisting is a different issue, hopefully I can rework the surfer UI this week to make that possible and webdav apparently does not support symlinks as such.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

the filelisting is a different issue, hopefully I can rework the surfer UI this week to make that possible

That would be great, good luck

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

webdav apparently does not support symlinks as such.

Ah, yes, I'd worked that out, but had forgotten that when I was rsyncing I was doing so to a local folder mounted using webdav. That's obviously why it didn't work.