URI redirect

When you visit kvarn.org, the web server doesn’t fetch the directory that is the root of the files. It naturally searches for public/index.html. That’s what most web servers do when a query points to a directory.

Kvarn takes this a step further (by default, you can of course disable this behaviour, but why would you?). For one, it checks the path of the request URI for a final /. Only then does it search for an index.html. This is due to performance - we wouldn’t want to check the FS if the request is a directory or a file. That takes time.

Additionally, it looks up .html if the path ends in .. kvarn.org/pipeline. = kvarn.org/pipeline.html. If an empty filename doesn’t make sense, why should a empty file extension?

This may cause trouble with social media. Just insert a html at the end.

The .html and index.html aren’t hard-coded, but can be changed.

This is handled using a prime extension, which internally redirects the request if it ends with . or /.

The method which handles this is with_uri_redirect.

HTTP to HTTPS

By default, Kvarn tries to upgrade HTTP requests to HTTPS ones, by replying with a 307 Temporary Redirect with a location of the same page, but with HTTPS.

This is also a prime extension, that redirects the request to a special prepare extension which is only accessible to the internals. There, it responds with the 307 Temporary Redirect.

The extension above has a higher priority and is therefore ran before. Notice the /index.html below.

$ curl -i http://icelk.dev
HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect
location: https://icelk.dev/index.html
server: Kvarn/0.5.0 (Linux)
connection: keep-alive

...

That is a by-product of the URI redirection.