How can I check on the server whether a request is made by Turbo? aka „What happened to Turbolinks-Referrer?“

Hello! I’m in the process of upgrading an app from Turbolinks to Turbo, and I wondered that happened to the Turbolinks-Referrer header that was available before.

I’m using it as for a few optimizations, for example I’m sending my SVG sprite inline, but only on the first (non-Turbolinks) request. I’m using Flask, but the way this works is pretty straightforward:

@app.before_request
def before_request():
    g.is_turbolinks = "Turbolinks-Referrer" in request.headers

and then, in my HTML templates, I can do:

<div style="display: none;" data-turbolinks-permanent id="global-svg">
	{% if g.is_turbolinks %}
		<!-- no svg because it's a turbolinks response -->
	{% else %}
		{{ insert_inline("sprite/sprite.svg") }}
	{% endif %}
</div>

I noticed that Turbo Drive does currently not seem to send any special headers. I added this workaround in my JavaScript:

document.addEventListener('turbo:before-fetch-request', (event) => {
  event.detail.fetchOptions.headers['Turbo-Referrer'] = window.location.href
})

I was just wondering if this was omitted on purpose, or if you didn’t get to it yet. I think it was really useful and I’d love to see it make a comeback! Thanks.

[kendagriff]

We’re also interested in some way for the server to distinguish between a full page refresh and a request initiated by Turbo-Drive. Seems like adding a Turbo-Drive request header, in the spirit of the Turbo-Frame header would be helpful.

Any interest in this?

[JonathanLorimer]

@danieldiekmeier ahhh, I misunderstood your problem, sorry for adding noise to the issue.