Netlify SSR Does Not Support URLs with "." (a dot or a period) in the URL

collinmmckinney · October 11, 2021, 5:14am

Hi there,

This has been a pain to debug today, but I think I have reached the bottom of the issue.
I am using server-side rendering with Netlify (the default SSR used when enabling it in settings).
I’m using it with React Helmet for dynamic metatags.

My site is focused-chandrasekhar-24a072
I have it hosted at hyaliko.com

I use react-router-dom to take any path of the form

https://www.hyaliko.com/

and route it to the same page.

So hyaliko - the social spatial nft gallery and hyaliko - the social spatial nft gallery both navigate to the same page.
The dynamic metatags work for those paths.

My issue is that when paths look like this “hyaliko - the social spatial nft gallery” the dynamic meta tags don’t load at all.

I have narrowed down the issue with 99% confidence and I’m pretty sure that the issue is the “.” in the last part of the path.
If I remove the dot and type in any other word or series of characters, it works fine, but as soon as they’re separated with a dot, it breaks.

Here’s some screenshots using Twitter’s OpenGraph tag debugger to illustrate

And to be clear, the app works totally fine, the only thing that doesn’t work is loading metatags through Netlify’s SSR. So I’m thinking that there might be something going on with the SSR where it does not handle paths that include dots (“.”).

This is actually a very pressing issue for me as I can’t change my URL schema and the only fix would be to migrate to a different platform.

Thanks in advance for the response!

Best,
Collin McKinney

collinmmckinney · October 11, 2021, 5:15am

Here’s the second screenshot

fool · October 12, 2021, 8:18pm

You’re not wrong - our prerendering service has a bug where files with dots in the name are not handled correctly:

github.com/netlify/prerender

Pages with dots get absolutely no metadata in Facebook Sharing Debugger

opened 02:15PM - 07 Aug 19 UTC

fabiofcferreira

traffic-mesh-candidate never_stale

Hey guys! First of all, thanks for all this good work and everything you've d…one for me and for @upframe x) (Never forget that time, someone tried to SQL inject our Netlify Forms' Form). We're using `react-helmet` and your pre-render feature (which I know is still in Beta). I'm reporting this issue for any other fellow programmers and users of pre-render can come here and know more. I have one link (https://connect.upframe.io/hugo.franca) which has the metadata set, but somehow Facebook cannot fetch it. It fetches the root `/` metadata. Do you know what might be causing this problem? I believe this is either a bug with Facebook or Netlify's pre-render and I also think that the fact that the path has a dot is also interfering as I created a new link (with the same data - without a dot in the URL) and it works. Here it is (https://connect.upframe.io/hugotest). Thanks in advance for the great work

So, if you use our prerendering service (which feeds facebook, twitter, slack, pinterest, etc) to generate your OG data, you’ll find paths like that don’t work well for that application and you should aim to avoid them for now if you require good prerendered output.

collinmmckinney · October 12, 2021, 8:39pm

oh wow, thanks for linking that issue! I hadn’t seen it.

Is there any sort of timeline on this issue being fixed at all? I know prerendering is still in beta, is it being worked on?

Would love info on this so i can decide whether to switch to an external pre-rendering service, because having dots in my URL is unfortunately a must

fool · October 12, 2021, 11:49pm

I don’t have any timeline for this fix, unfortunately. I know it is not likely to happen in the next couple of months.

I also know that is not the answer you were hoping for, but I do want to be transparent since while I cannot fix the codepaths, I can at least help you plan for your business’ needs.

Unfortunately - the same thing is likely to happen with an external prerendering service by my understanding. It’s pretty easy on our side to enable prerender.io or prerender.cloud if you want to do a quick test (but I don’t have an account at either to test on, myself). We do need the API token which you should not post publicly if you do decide to do that test. I’d suggest a separate site since we can’t activate the setting - only configure it, and it gets activated with your next deploy (and then you can’t change it, only we can) - so best to isolate it during testing is my advice.