Symbolic links not supported

Sad to see this error.

I have all my javascript (and other) web packages managed by bower. I then set up symbolic links (in linux) from the various js files I will use within those packages to a js directory within the static folder. The idea being is if I do a bower update then hugo will use in the latest js files when it builds. I am trying to avoid putting the entire bower_components (packages) folder within the static folder because that just puts a lot of unsued files into the website itself.

Can anyone suggest an alternative workable workflow so one simple bower update command and hugo uses the latest js files?

Guess I don’t understand symbolic links well enough to understand why hugo would complain about this. I use them all the time to “fool” other programs. So is it possible that Hugo can support symbolic links in a future release? Is this really because it is an OS specific issue? I mean one would have to build for example a linux specific version?

Ask Google’s Rob Pike about why symbolic links are a challenge.

Hugo doesn’t support them because Go’s filepath.Walk doesn’t follow them:.

http://golang.org/pkg/path/filepath/#WalkFunc

In the latest Hugo, an error will be printed to the console when a symbolic link is found.

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Such as it is.

For any reading who may be using bower I found this. It does what I need (i.e. puts only the required files of a package where I want them i.e. /static).

https://www.npmjs.com/package/bower-installer

short of this there is always bash script. :-).

I came across this today… I mean the symlink error. In my case, nothing to do with Bower.

However, it actually works ( @bep )

So, in Windows, recreated the Hugoo content folder as a symlink to content_src (just as an exxperiment).

I get this ‘Symbolic links for directories not supported’, but Hugo does follow and the content is generated as it should be.

So i could do this, just have to live with the error. But am I missing something here?

filepath.Walk, the Go function doing the heavy lifting, doesn’t follow symbolic links, hence the error. But I believe that the “root folder” as a symbolic link should work, and that is what you see – and the error message is wrong. (could you create an issue at GitHub?)

So /content_src as a symbolic link seems to be fine, but /content/blog or whatever would fail. Not sure.

Thanks for the explanation, sounds like that’s what’s going on. Will create issue.

See

Note that this only supports symbolic links for the top-level directory of these different content paths – so /static can be a symbolic link, but not /static/js …