Hugo: Consider allowing symlinks below /assets in project

[bep]

https://discourse.gohugo.io/t/symlinks-error-blocks-site-rendering-in-hugo-server-in-0-50/14962/2

[davidsneighbour]

Hugo needs either this or has to allow the use of relative paths like "../node_modules...." in concat pipelines. At the moment I have to copy all needed files into the assets folder before using it to concat - which doubles the files "laying around". node_modules has to be outside of the assets directory in root, otherwise, other build scripts won't work.

[bep]

@davidsneighbour yes, we need to fix this -- but the problem with symbolic links is that they create its own set of problems/challenges on change detection. I'm not sure that is such a problem inside /assets -- but I suspect a better solution to this would be to allow multiple asset dirs, e.g.

assetDir = ["assets", "node_modules"]

And probably also alias the plural version:

assetDirs = ["assets", "node_modules"]

Not sure how the path resolution would work here, but ideally I would want to do resource.Get "my_node_module/css/foo.css".

[onedrawingperday]

the problem with symbolic links is that they create its own set of problems/challenges on change detection. I'm not sure that is such a problem inside /assets -- but I suspect a better solution to this would be to allow multiple asset dirs

Prior to Hugo 0.50 a symlink under /assets/ that pointed to /static/images/ was working fine, no problems whatsoever.

Since then I have to use disableBrowserError in the config for the project to build but still I get a console ERROR in the form of ...failed to render "/"...

I'm not sure if multiple assetDirs would be the solution to this problem but it does seem like an improvement from the current situation, (that is kind of annoying since 0.50).

[bep]

@onedrawingperday not sure what the "it worked before" post before brings to this discussion.

[onedrawingperday]

@bep You asked above and I replied:

I'm not sure that is such a problem inside /assets

Anyway Happy Holiday!

[DennisJohnsen]

I'm currently trying to do a neat way of handling JS and bundling directly in our Hugo based projects, and just now i ran into needing this feature.

My current example is that i have an array of the scripts in my config.toml and then i range over that array to use resources.Concat.

[params.js]
    partials = [
        '../node_modules/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js',
        '../node_modules/jquery-validation/dist/jquery.validate.min.js',
        'scripts/generic/global.js',
        'scripts/generic/parallax.js',
        'scripts/generic/format.js',
        'scripts/generic/intro.js',
        'scripts/navigation/smooth-scroll.js',
        'scripts/navigation/sticky-nav.js',
        'scripts/gallery/modal.js',
        'scripts/contact/google-maps.js',
        'scripts/contact/validation.js',
        'scripts/contact/send-mail.js'
    ]

{{ $js := slice }}

{{ range .Site.Params.js.partials }}
  {{ $js = $js | append (resources.Get . ) }}
{{ end }}

{{ $scripts := $js | resources.Concat "dist/scripts.js" | resources.Minify }}

<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ $scripts.Permalink }}"></script>

The error the above code gives: <resources.Get>: error calling Get: FindFirstFile F:\Hugo\project-name\assets\node_modules\jquery\dist\jquery.min.js: The syste m cannot find the path specified.

Right now, to make it easier for my self, i will just include those two node includes directly into the assets folder. But having the option to move outside the assets folder would be awesome!