# How I fixed the trailing slash in Netlify rewrites

> How I fixed broken relative links and images caused by missing trailing slashes in Netlify rewrites, using a tiny client-side script to append the slash.

Author: Flavio Copes | Published: 2019-12-01 | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/netlify-fix-trailing-slash-rewrite/

[Netlify](https://flaviocopes.com/netlify/) has this great feature that allows me to create a number of duplicate pages, by adding them into the `_redirects` file in the public root of the project (`public/_redirects` in Hugo, for example).

I use it to power some of my websites.

If I have a bunch of pages under `content/original`, by writing:

```
/copy/* /original/:splat  200
```

I can call the URL

`/copy`

and when I access `https://mysite.com/copy` I have the content stored inside `https://mysite.com/original`, and the URL does _not_ change. It's not a redirect (despite the `_redirects` file name), it's a rewrite because I used the `200` code at the end. Had I used 301, that would have been a 301 redirect.

If you want to check your rules before deploying, I built a free [redirects simulator](https://flaviocopes.com/tools/redirects-simulator/) where you paste your `_redirects` file and test paths against it.

Anyway, the problem I stumbled upon is this: there's no way to automatically add the trailing slash at the end, so if you access `/copy` and `/copy/`, and you use relative URLs for images and links, without trailing slash URLs will lead to 404 and images will be broken.

I looked for a solution in my static site generator, to see if it could replicate redirects in another way, but in the end my solution was client side.

And very simple.

I added this [JavaScript](https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/) snippet at the bottom of my pages:

```html
<script>
(function() {
  if (!location.href.endsWith('/')) {
    window.location = location.href + '/'
  }
}())
</script>
```

And the page now if there's no trailing slash will immediately reload with the slash appended at the end.

The process is so quick it's almost invisible to the user.