[Proposal] Remove the trailing slash in URL

[bpierre]

With the following URLs:

http://myapp.dev/admin
http://myapp.dev/admin/users

I can’t “hack” the URL by removing the users part of the second one, a 404 will be triggered because of the trailing slash:

http://myapp.dev/admin/

I think that “hackable URLs” are a nice way to interact with an application.

Proposal

The Router class could handle this: if a route is not matched, but the path ends with a slash, then try again to match the route after removing the trailing slash.

If the route exists, then redirect to the correct route, without trailing slash. Or maybe don’t even redirect, like GitHub does (it could be a setting):

https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues
https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/

Router->dispatch() could handle this, or maybe Router->handleRoutingException().

[billmn]

👍

[ipalaus]

I'm sure github does that before hitting the application.

[zimt28]

We've already had this discussion, it's wanted behavior since there are some advantages.
See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.de/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html

[bpierre]

@zimt28 I don’t see the point, could you add a link to the discussion? The article you are mentioning is about returning 200 or 301/302 redirects to handle trailing slashes, not 404.

More precisely, it seems Google is ok with 200 on both, even without rel="canonical":

If both slash and non-trailing-slash versions contain the same content and each returns 200, you can:

• […]
• Leave it as-is. Many sites have duplicate content. Our indexing process often handles this case for webmasters and users. While it’s not totally optimal behavior, it’s perfectly legitimate and a-okay. :)

And recommends to pick one and redirect the other one:

If only one version can be returned (i.e., the other redirects to it), that’s great! This behavior is beneficial because it reduces duplicate content.

[zimt28]

I actually wanted to do that but the discussion took place on the old illuminate/router or something which has been deleted in between.

[franzliedke]

@bpierre The problem is that Laravel 4 currently only works with the variant that you specify in your routes. If you don't use a slash there, the variant with the slash will return a 404 error message.

[robclancy]

I was actually surprised when I noticed laravel didn't do this already, it just seems logical to me that it should match fine with or without the trailing slash.

[bpierre]

@franzliedke Yes, and with a slash, that’s the variant without slash which returns a 404. I want both :-)

I tried to add /? to the route, but the route syntax is not a regex.
Then I tried hacking the route params, which supports regexes. It works, but it’s really ugly!

Route::get('admin{slash?}', function($slash)
{
    // （╯°⁔°）╯ ︵ ┻━┻
})
->where('slash', '\/');

Plus, this still requires to handle the redirect.

[frankmayer]

+1 on having some way to do this.

[BenJenkinson]

I agree entirely, hackable URLs are brilliant. I actually raised this issue earlier, but @taylorotwell closed it saying "Just don't use trailing slashes."

[bpierre]

@BenJenkinson Thanks for the link. As you said, it’s not our fault, it’s our users, and we have to guide them to the no-trailing-slash enlightenment :-)

[franzliedke]

That's super annoying during development, though. I certainly don't remember to delete the slash when I manually go up in the hierarchy by deleting the last URL segment.

[BenJenkinson]

It is both annoying and non-obvious, as demonstrated by the identical issues raised by myself earlier, @bpierre here and @DPr00f over on laravel/laravel Issue #1596.

I also found this earlier laravel/laravel Issue #1368 where they point out that redirecting will sometimes cause problems with form submission; if the URL used for the form action attribute is not the same (with or without slash) as the non-redirected URL.

[wishfoundry]

@bpierre , @frankmayer, @zimt28 , @billmn

Using regex in L4 makes things so much more powerful. Let's not fix what isn't broken.
Trailing slashes can be easily supported by the user adding his own function in routes, no need to modify core

Route::get('{any}', function($url){
    return Redirect::to(mb_substr($url, 0, -1), 301);
})->where('any', '(.*)\/$');

[frankmayer]

@wishfoundry, yes that would be easy, but for people just starting off with L4 I see a lot of feature and help requests. Maybe it would be good to have this in the docs?