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I'm a UX designer with some front end skills (though a complete novice with server config and Craft). I'm hoping someone can help me with something that seems rather basic.

Setup: Mac Book Pro running High Sierra (10.13.5). Using MAMP 4.4.1 (free version) PHP 7.2.1, MySQL, and Craft 3. The site loads in a browser when I visit: http://localhost:8888/.

My craft files are here: Macintosh HD/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/.

The template file in question is here: Macintosh HD/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/templates/_layouts/base.html

In the base.html file, in the head section, I am attempting to link to several CSS files. Here's the entire head section:

<head>
    {% block head %}
      <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
      <meta charset="utf-8">
      <title>{% if title is defined %}{{ title }} - {% endif %}{{ siteName }}</title>
      <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
      {% css %}
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ siteUrl }}src/css/typeplate.css">
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ siteUrl }}src/css/grid.css">
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ siteUrl }}src/css/screen.css">
      {% endcss %}
    {% endblock %}
</head>

The CSS files in question are here: Macintosh HD/Applications/MAMP/htdocs/src/css.

The Problem: When I load the home page, the CSS does not load.

Things I've Tried:

  • I've tried removing the siteURL bit, and just hardcoding things instead (like this: http://localhost/src/css/typeplate.css), and I get 404 errors for the 3 css files under the network tab in Chrome developer tools.
  • I've tried removing the {% css } brackets around the stylesheet links, and the network tab in Chrome dev tools just tells me "failed" when the links are hard coded. When the links have {{ siteUrl}} in them, I can see the browser looking for the files at www.mywebsite.com/src/css/typeplate.css. But the files aren't currently there - this is a local dev site only.
  • I've tried changing the dev siteUrl in general.php from "null" to "http://localhost/", and the web page stops loading altogether.
  • I've tried different hard coded URL's, like (../src/css/typeplate.css).
  • I've searched StackExchange for similar problems, but I can't seem to make sense of any of the answers.

Can anyone help? Thank you so much in advance.

Improve this question
  • "I've tried changing the dev siteUrl in general.php from "null" to "localhost"" - try changing that to 'localhost:8888'. If it doesn't load, set 'devMode' => true in your craft/config/general.php file, reload the page and see if you get an error. – Brad Bell Jul 10 '18 at 22:30
  • 1
    Thanks so much for the suggestion, Brad. I tried both things, and the home page will not load. It says "This page isn’t working localhost is currently unable to handle this request. HTTP ERROR 500" – Chris Treadwell Jul 10 '18 at 23:28
  • Strike my previous comment, Brad. I had a syntax problem (forgot the comma at the end of the row!). So, now there's no error. However, I still have the wrong file path, apparently. The browser is looking at localhost:8888/src/css/typeplate.css, and it says 404 for the CSS file in the network tab in Chrome developer tools. And when I put that file path into the browser's address bar directly, I get a craft 404 page that's got a bunch of stuff on it that I can't hardly make any sense of. What would be the file path for my src folder? – Chris Treadwell Jul 11 '18 at 1:16
  • Update: after some searching, I decided to move my src/ folder into the web/ folder, since Craft seems to be looking only there and not at anything above that directory. Then, my CSS links were updated to relative paths like this: src/css/typeplate.css. And that worked. – Chris Treadwell Jul 11 '18 at 1:37
  • Glad you're all sorted, Chris... would you mind adding your solution as an official answer in case it ends up helping someone in the future? – Brad Bell Jul 11 '18 at 23:17
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After some searching, I decided to move my src/ folder into the web/ folder, since Craft seems to be looking only there and not at anything above that directory. Then, my CSS links were updated to relative paths like this: src/css/typeplate.css. And that worked.

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  • 1
    Glad you found a solution Chris! If you're wondering why many projects have CSS files in the /src folder, it's because often these days, people use an automated workflow to combine and compress multiple CSS/JS files from /src, and then place the result in /web One of the tools for this is called Gulp (there's also Grunt), and nystudio107.com/blog/… gives a great overview of how it works. – James Greig Jul 13 '18 at 5:39

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