jaysen naidoo's public-Txt jaysen - txt

Fix to publictxt-pages: search on sites served from a subpath

blog publictxt bugfix search publictxt-pages

#publictxt #bugfix #search #publictxt-pages

The search page on the published site showed “The search index has not been built yet”, even though the index had been built and deployed.

What was wrong

Search is Pagefind. The browser loads pagefind/pagefind.js from the site root, so the page needs to know where that root is. publictxt-pages passes it to search.js as a data-base attribute on the <html> tag.

The attribute was generated with {{ "/" | relURL }}. For a site at the root of a domain (https://publictxt.net/) that gives /, which is correct. The site was being served from https://publictxt.github.io/publictext/, and the live page still had data-base="/". So search.js requested /pagefind/pagefind.js, which doesn’t exist, instead of /publictext/pagefind/pagefind.js.

The error message made it harder to spot. search.js shows “index not built” for any failure to load Pagefind, so a wrong path looked the same as a missing build. The index was there all along: the correct URL returned 200.

The fix

data-base is now {{ site.Home.RelPermalink }}, which follows the baseURL:

  • https://publictxt.net/ gives /
  • https://publictxt.github.io/publictext/ gives /publictext/

search.js already normalizes the trailing slash, so both forms work.

The change is one line in layouts/baseof.html, in publictxt-pages commit 7569bf5.

Caveats

  • On a multilingual site, site.Home.RelPermalink would include the language prefix (e.g. /fr/), which would point at the wrong place for the index. This site is single-language, so it doesn’t apply, but it’s worth knowing if that changes.
  • The “index not built” message still appears for any load failure. Showing the underlying error, or the URL that was tried, would make the next case quicker to diagnose.

Getting the fix live

The publish workflow checks out publictxt-pages main at build time, so no change is needed in this repo. Re-run the “Publish site” workflow, or push any commit here.

Note: in previously broken sites, its necessary to do a hard refresh in browser to reload the search index.