jQuery blatantly ignoring the path I give to .getScript()

Question

I have a script, TemplateLoader.js which loads 2 Mustache templates, and renders them on the page (or at least that's the goal).

My directory structure:

COMP266
    Unit 4
        scripts
            mustache.min.js
            TemplateLoader.js
        PageUsingTemplateLoader.html

Inside of TemplateLoader (the object), I have the following chunk to load Mustache, and render the templates:

$.getScript("./scripts/mustache.min.js", function() {
    $('head').html( Mustache.render(headTemplate, data) );
    $('body').html( Mustache.render(bodyTemplate, data, uniqueBodyTemplate) );
});

This however, yields the following error in the developer console:

HTTP404: NOT FOUND - The server has not found anything matching the requested URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). (XHR): GET - http://localhost:63342/COMP266/Unit%204/mustache.min.js?_=1450903391318

Oddly, it seems to have dropped the script folder completely from the path.

I decided to play around, so I changed the fetch path to (duplicating the script folder):

./scripts/scripts/mustache.min.js

But this yields:

HTTP404: NOT FOUND - The server has not found anything matching the requested URI (Uniform Resource Identifier). (XHR): GET - http://localhost:63342/COMP266/Unit%204/scripts/scripts/mustache.min.js?_=1450903743022

Now it's listening! Unfortunately, this is obviously the wrong path.

I have no idea how to go about debugging this. It seems like jQuery is selectively dropping the scripts folder. That seems ridiculous, but just to make sure, I searched through the jQuery source, and couldn't find anything that would be doing the observed filtering of the path.

It's currently local, not hosted.

Can anyone give me a hint about what's going on here?

No idea really but I'd do the following: view the source of TemplateLoader.js as delivered to the browser. I don't know what your web server is but I suspect some configuration on the server is re-writing the path; the next thing would be to simply change the name of the scripts folder to js and see if that fixes the issue. — bknights, Dec 23 '15 at 21:03
@bknights It's local currently, so there shouldn't be anything messing with it. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:04
@KevinB I don't even know what that is. Is that a part of jQuery? — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:05
No, it would be server-side. think, .htaccess, or web.config. — Kevin B, Dec 23 '15 at 21:05
@KevinB It's local currently, so it can't be that. I've updated the question. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:06
localhost can have .htaccess and/or web.config, so it being "local" is irrelevant, unless you're working from file:/// — Kevin B, Dec 23 '15 at 21:08
do you really need the space in `Unit 4` folder ? Are you sure, it is not messing things up? — Alp, Dec 23 '15 at 21:09
@ludo It looks at `http://localhost:63342/COMP266/Unit%204/mustache.min.js?_=1450905003395` — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:11
Since you are using http then there is some web server involved. I'm pretty sure IIS for instance had scripts set up as a magic folder. — bknights, Dec 23 '15 at 21:11
@kevinB Unless WebStorm has set something up, there shouldn't be any configuration going on. I'll do a search. Thanks. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:12
@Alp I'll trying removing the space. Edit: No change. It has the same behavior. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:12
What's your server ? Node.js ? Grunt connect? IIS ? Apache ? — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:15
@Ludo I have done nothing to set up a web server. The site will eventually be hosted on my school site, but for now, I wrote up the pages/scripts in Webstorm, then asked it to run it. I'm starting to think it's doing something. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:18
I see, it's WebStorm's internal server. Try running a `node` server. Or a `python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080` server, and check if the error persists. — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:20
Ya, it's WebStorm: http://blog.jetbrains.com/webide/2013/03/built-in-server-in-webstorm-6/. Honestly, I'm not even sure how to go about running it on another server. That's something I'll need to learn first. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:24
If you're on OSX, go in console, `cd` to your directory where `index.html` is, and write `python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080`. Then go to `localhost:8080` in your browser — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:27
If you're on windows, you can always use MAMP https://www.mamp.info/en/ — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:29
@Ludo I tried on Windows, but Python complains that I don't have a `SimpleHTTPServer` module. Is it an external module, or does it come with python? — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:33
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17351016/set-up-python-simplehttpserver-on-windows — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:34
@Ludo Thanks for the link. I got a Python server going, and got the same error (`http://localhost:8080/mustache.min.js?_=1450906896119`). For your second comment, error again (`http://localhost:63342/COMP266/Unit%204/mustache.min.js?_=1450906958237`) — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:43
@Ludo Already tried that. Alp suggested that above. I'm now using `js`. The weird thing is, if I point to `scripts`, it will attempt to load it (although the folder doesn't exist since the rename), but if I then point back to `js`, it drops that folder from the path. It's like something is dropping any folder that contain scripts. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:49
@Ludo It was read-only. I changed that, and nothing happened. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:54
Try to re-create the folder, then create the files anew, and copy/paste the content of your js files in the new ones. Maybe it'll help. — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:55
@Ludo I'll try that in a sec. I found something weird though. In the Python server console, after reloading the page, I got the following 2 lines: `127.0.0.1 - - [23/Dec/2015 14:56:11] "GET /js/mustache.min.js?_=1450907771020 HTTP/1.1" 200 - 127.0.0.1 - - [23/Dec/2015 14:56:11] code 404, message File not found 127.0.0.1 - - [23/Dec/2015 14:56:11] "GET /mustache.min.js?_=1450907771021 HTTP/1.1" 404 -` It looks like it's requesting the file twice, once with bad address, and once with the valid address. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 21:58
Sometimes servers will look up multiple routes to find a file. — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 21:59
@Ludo HOLY. Ok, I solved it. It turns out I'm a complete idiot. I don't know why this caused it exactly, but it did. I'll add an answer. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 22:02
Don't worry. You know how programming is, and that DUH at the end :-) — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 22:13
@Ludo Very true. Thanks for your help. At the very least, I learned how to start a server using Python lol. — Carcigenicate, Dec 23 '15 at 22:15
Hey and If you feel stupid now, means you're smarter than then ;-) — Ludovic C, Dec 23 '15 at 22:16

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 23 '15 at 22:05

It turns out the issue was caused by me forgetting that my template added the mustache script (from a previous test), resulting in it being added twice.

I don't understand how this affected it though. It's not like the jQuery addition was succeeding while the template addition was causing the error, since changing the jQuery fetch path caused a direct change in the error message.

Sure enough though, when I removed the script import from the template, it worked.

I really don't understand how this caused a specific folder to be dropped from the path though.

jQuery blatantly ignoring the path I give to .getScript()

1 Answers1