w3id.org

Appearance

htaccess/no-rawgit ​

Severity: error · Status: enforced · Applies to: ids/**/.htaccess

What ​

A redirect target must not use rawgit.com or cdn.rawgit.com. Use jsDelivr for files, or GitHub Pages for pages meant to be read.

Why ​

RawGit has shut down. Its repository is archived, with a notice to use jsDelivr instead.

  • rawgit.com returns 404. An identifier redirecting there does not resolve.
  • cdn.rawgit.com only forwards to jsDelivr. It works today because a shut-down service still answers, and it can stop without notice.

jsDelivr serves the same files from GitHub, and it is what RawGit's notice points to. It also sends a real content type for RDF — text/turtle, application/rdf+xml, application/ld+json — which raw.githubusercontent.com does not.

Wrong ​

apache
RewriteRule ^vocab$ https://rawgit.com/user/repo/master/vocab.ttl [R=303,L]
RewriteRule ^vocab$ https://cdn.rawgit.com/user/repo/v1.0/vocab.ttl [R=303,L]
apache
RewriteRule ^vocab$ https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/user/repo@v1.0/vocab.ttl [R=303,L]

How to fix ​

Move the ref after an @:

https://rawgit.com/user/repo/REF/path/file.ttl
https://cdn.rawgit.com/user/repo/REF/path/file.ttl
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/user/repo@REF/path/file.ttl

The finding names the exact URL to use. Check that it returns the file and the content type you expect:

sh
curl -sIL https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/user/repo@v1.0/vocab.ttl \
  | grep -iE '^(HTTP|content-type)'

Two things to know about jsDelivr:

  • It serves HTML as text/plain, so a browser shows the source. For a documentation page, use the repository's GitHub Pages site instead.
  • It caches a branch, so a push to master can take a while to appear. A URL naming a tag or a commit always serves the same file.

How to check ​

Run w3id-check with --rule htaccess/no-rawgit to check this rule on its own; without it the tool runs every rule, as the pull request checks do.

sh
node tools/check/bin/w3id-check.js --rule htaccess/no-rawgit ids/my-project

This is a critical rule, so w3id-check --triage lists every identifier in the tree that still uses RawGit.

Testing your changes covers installing the tool, and what else is worth checking by hand.

See also ​