content plugins reject options.routeBasePath = ''

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines on issues.

Description

When I use default preset options

module.exports = {
  presets: [
    [
      '@docusaurus/preset-classic',
      {
        pages: {
          path: 'src/pages',
          routeBasePath: '',
          include: ['**/*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx,md,mdx}'],
          exclude: [
            '**/_*.{js,jsx,ts,tsx,md,mdx}',
            '**/_*/**',
            '**/*.test.{js,jsx,ts,tsx}',
            '**/__tests__/**',
          ],
          mdxPageComponent: '@theme/MDXPage',
          remarkPlugins: [require('remark-math')],
          rehypePlugins: [],
          beforeDefaultRemarkPlugins: [],
          beforeDefaultRehypePlugins: [],
        },
      },
    ],
  ],
};

It pointed out that ValidationError: "routeBasePath" is not allowed to be empty

Self-service

• I’d be willing to address this documentation request myself.

[Josh-Cena]

routeBasePath is somehow the “plugin baseUrl”. It made sense to me to be consistent between baseUrl and routeBasePath

Yeah, I’ll agree with that stance. Well, I’ll prefer to normalize—I know it was previously used as a “multiple root plugins” hack, which is why I don’t like ""; but if we always normalize, I do prefer the non-erroring side.

[slorber]

Frankly I don’t get the semantic difference between '/' and ''. Is the latter only useful to hack around the “multiple root plugins” issue?

I don’t even remember what this issue is exactly but I don’t think it hacks around anything if we normalize ‘’ to ‘/’ anyway.

If that’s the case I think we should continue to reject it until the actual issue is properly remedied.

‘/’ works so if we normalize ‘’ to ‘/’ there won’t be issues, it would work as if user provided “/” 🤷‍♂️

We already normalize slashes, but I don’t think we should allow empty strings unless it has clear semantics.

To me using “docs” (default plugin routeBasePath value) instead of “/docs/” is not particularly more semantically wrong than using ‘’ instead of ‘/’.

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routeBasePath is somehow the “plugin baseUrl”. It made sense to me to be consistent between baseUrl and routeBasePath

Now I didn’t notice but we actually don’t accept baseUrl: '' . I thought we did normalize it to “/” already, but instead it prints an error message:

“baseUrl” is not allowed to be empty

I suggest either:

• allow ‘’ for both baseUrl and routeBasePath, eventually emit a warning saying the value should rather be ‘/’
• reject ‘’ for both baseUrl and routeBasePath with a clearer error message explaining to use ‘/’ instead (+ fix docs using ‘’)

The first option looks better to me, as users will intuitively try to use ‘’.

Do we want to throw on start while we could handle the bad value more gracefully?

Heck, we could even accept null/false here 🤷‍♂️