Uploaded files are lowercased

[themre]

Hi,
I noticed an issue when deploying a site for a school. We have uppercased some files and after deployment I noticed they are lowercased.

Netlify

Although it’s not consistent, some files are not found, some are. For now I will change that the casing of certain files will be lowercased, but it’s really problematic to have inconsistent behaviour.

UPDATE:
I noticed that URLs are different from the URL in the HTML vs casing when accessing the file:
https://os-iroba.si/docs/seznam%20učbenikov%202024-2025.pdf (generated by HTML)
https://os-iroba.si/docs/seznam%20učbenikov%202024-2025.pdf (generated by adding full name to browser and reloading).

I’m using NextJS and the URL was constructed like so: href="/docs/seznam učbenikov 2024-2025.pdf"

Thanks for the help!

[nathanmartin]

@themre The lowercase for static files is the standard behavior on Netlify, if you search the forum you will see various threads mentioning it.

For example:

How to disable "Uppercase URLs are redirected to Lowercase URLs" feature?

Netlify automatically normalises URLs to lowercase and there’s no way to disable it.

How to disable "Uppercase URLs are redirected to Lowercase URLs" feature?

This is not expected to change (it’s not a bug): Bug in Production Download - #8 by hrishikesh

Searching will also reveal various suggestions/workarounds.

[themre]

Thanks @nathanmartin for quick reply. In this case it actually happened that urlifying the space + some slovenian letters breaks, because it seems nextjs and your behaviour is not in sync. Do you have some knowledge of this issue? Otherwise I will just remove all special characters.

[nathanmartin]

@themre It’s not my behavior, as I don’t work for Netlify.

What do you mean by ‘urlifying’?

What is the…

• Filename of the PDF and its location in your output files?
  (When running your build locally, without any Netlify processing)
• Filename of the PDF and its location after Netlify’s processing?
  (Both the links in your original post are the same, and neither result in the PDF file for me)

[themre]

@nathanmartin
Sorry for late reply, was away few days. with urlifying I meant encoding URL with special characters. I leave my files in public folder which nextjs doesn’t process and they are intact. So in my example the file is:
/docs/VLOGA ZA PREPIS NA OŠ IVANA ROBA ŠEMEPTER PRI GORICI.pdf.

But when I do a deployment, I see /docs/vloga za prepis na oš ivana roba šemepter pri gorici.pdf

Is this now some limitation to have all assets lowercased? Although sometimes it works also with uppercase and sometimes not. Really confusing.

Thanks for the help!

[nathanmartin]

@themre

Is this now some limitation to have all assets lowercased?

The files being changed to lowercase is a limitation, but it’s not a new one.
You can see references to it from many years ago:

My URL paths are forced into lowercase

Hi Peter, This is an intended feature of our platform from which you cannot opt out. We’ll serve any combination of case (e.g. FiLe.HtMl or file.html or FILE.HTML) correctly, though the mixed-case ones will be redirected to the “canonical” lowercase definition. We found that most people deploy from a non-case-sensitive filesystem (windows/mac) and this was the best way to make things work as most folks intended. Aside from the unwanted (1-time per browser) HTTP 301 redirect, which gets cache…

It is all static files as per the discussion/explanation in the thread that I linked:

How to disable "Uppercase URLs are redirected to Lowercase URLs" feature?

We do that only for static files. Rewrites to other sites, Netlify Functions, etc. should work in case-insensitive manner.

When you say:

@themre

Although sometimes it works also with uppercase and sometimes not. Really confusing.

Since you’re using Next.js it’s likely some of your paths are routed via functions.

[themre]

Thanks for the detailed answer and all the help, will need to remember these limitations. Interestingly the only issue are special characters like š, č, ž and uppercase ones and those are it seems an issue when doing redirect to uppercased file. Will close the ticket.