catalyst consistent url format with trailing slash

Question

I'm developing a Catalyst application and having trouble with the way Catalyst interprets urls.

Let's say that in our Catalyst application we have a controller Account. If this is the case, Catalyst will interpret

http://mydomain.com/account and http://mydomain.com/account/

as the same url for the index action.

However, for SEO and linking purposes (and just to be consistent overall) I would like to force Catalyst to only recognize one format and stick to it.

I've found one module that seems to be built for this: Catalyst::Plugin::SanitizeUrl, it's documentation says you should just put

use Catalyst 'SanitizeUrl';

in myapp.pm and this will handle everything for you.

However, whenever I use it I just get this error:

Bad request

On every page load. Does anyone know of a simple way to have Catalyst only use one format?

Answer 1

I ended up combining what edem said with some stuff that I did and this is my end result:

sub begin :Private {
    my ($self, $c) = @_;

    #don't allow trailing slashes!
    my @path = split "/", $c->req->path, -1;
    if(@path and (pop @path eq '')) {
        my $p = join '/', @path;
        #set as moved permanently
        $c->res->redirect("/$p", 301);
        return;
    }
}

If there is a trailing slash at the end of the request, it will always redirect to the same url but without the slash.

Answer 2

The simple way to force Catalyst use only one format without trailing slash is add this method to MyApp.pm:

sub begin :Private {
    my ($self, $c) = @_;
    my @path = split "/", $c->req->path, -1;
    $c->detach('default') if @path and (pop @path eq '');
}

It will redirect on 'default' method a.k.a Page 404 if uri ends with slash on any request.

Answer 3

I guess you can forward url to different action method depending on whether trailing / is present or not. So,

sub index :Path :Args(0) { 
    my ($self,$c) = @_;
    my $path = $c->request->path;
    my $matched = $path =~ s/(\/)$//;
    if ($matched) {
          $c->forward('withslash');
    }
    else {
          $c->forward('withoutslash');
    }
}

Again this is an untried solution, you might need to check it.