[v2] Properly serve static files

[Yurickh]

Issue #2352 brought to my attention that express.static wasn't serving any static files, leaving all the heavy lifting to lines 161-187.

This is due to the fact that __dirname is the local filename, not the project root.

Actually, express uses the place from where the node process is called (usually the project root) as the actual root for serving static files, so I just went ahead and removed it.

Before, having a public folder like:

static/
  my-custom-folder/
    - index.html

Would raise 404 for /my-custom-folder, but not for /my-custom-folder/index.html or /my-custom-folder/.

Now, when accessing /my-custom-folder, we're getting redirected to /my-custom-folder/, as one might expect.

Edit: this was originally intended to go with v2, but I guess we can hotfix it down to v1 as well?

Closes #2352
Closes freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp#18093

[KyleAMathews]

🤦‍♂️ oh wow! Not sure why we didn't notice that express.static wasn't doing it's job and that we thought we had to recreate it haha :-)

[gatsbot]

Holy buckets, @Yurickh — we just merged your PR to Gatsby! 💪💜

Gatsby is built by awesome people like you. Let us say “thanks” in two ways:

1. We’d like to send you some Gatsby swag. As a token of our appreciation, you can go to the Gatsby Swag Store and log in with your GitHub account to get a coupon code good for one free piece of swag. (Currently we’ve got a couple t-shirts available, plus some socks that are really razzing our berries right now.)
2. We just invited you to join the Gatsby organization on GitHub. This will add you to our team of maintainers. You’ll receive an email shortly asking you to confirm. By joining the team, you’ll be able to label issues, review pull requests, and merge approved pull requests.

If there’s anything we can do to help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us: tweet at @gatsbyjs and we’ll come a-runnin’.

Thanks again!

[simoneb]

any idea why this doesn't seem to work? a regression perhaps?

storing an html page in /static/login/index.html leads to the 404 page when trying to navigate to /login, /login/ or /login/index.html

[patriziosotgiu]

I'm having the same issue.
I was able to troubleshoot and it seems to be working fine until Gatsby v2.1.23.
Starting from v2.1.24 it doesn't work anymore and I get the 404.

As a temporary solution I'm using this plugin: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/packages/gatsby-plugin-static-folders/

[Yurickh]

I'll take a look at it. 🎉
In the meantime, could either @patriziosotgiu or @simoneb open a new issue? This doesn't seem related to this PR even though it's a similar issue.

[patriziosotgiu]

Thanks @Yurickh, sounds good, I'll open a new issue in the morning (Unless @simoneb gets on it earlier).

[simoneb]

Reported new issue #13072