SSR and i18n files - Intermittent failures

[Adam Doan]

Hi everyone, 

I have a DSpace 8.3 codebase that we’ve recently upgraded from DSpace 7. Everything seems to work well, with the exception of one intermittent issue that seems to be related to SSR and the inability to load the i18n translation files. 

The site will work fine for a while, but if you click around enough, eventually the UI requests for the en.[hash].json requests will start failing, and all of the translation keys will show up (not just a few). At the same time, I can see that the UI also requests en.json (without the hash), which I assume is a fallback behaviour when it can’t find the cache-busting hash file. That file also returns a 404, and then the translation keys display. 

Additional details:

• The site is built with yarn build: prod
•  The site is served by PM2 in cluster mode
• The site is proxied by Envoy proxy 

I did some searching and found some similar issues, but none of them had the intermittent nature of what I’m describing: 

• SSR failing because is looking for .json translation files instead of .json5
• 404 error on language files in production

I was able to come up with a workaround for this, but it is definitely a band-aid that takes advantage of that fallback behaviour. I have a script that I use to build and deploy the site. Once the yarn build: prod command finishes, I added some code that copies the en.[hash].json file to en.json so that the file is present for that fallback behaviour. It does seem to resolve the issue but I don’t really like the idea of relying on that long term.

Anyone else run into this or something similar or have any insights into what is going on? Thanks!

-Adam

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Adam Doan (He/Him)

Systems Developer, Digital Strategy & Technology

(519) 824-4120 x52974

www.uoguelph.ca  |  www.lib.uoguelph.ca

McLaughlin Library

50 Stone Road East

Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1

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