Exclude Files from CDN

Forge takes all your assets â images, javascript and css files and puts them onto our global CDN, whenever you deploy your site. It's part of what makes Forge special.

The Problem

But there are some files that you may prefer not to have the paths dynamically rewritten with each deployment, for example, some JSON data that you want to reference or Robots.txt for telling the search engines how you want them to interact with your site.

Right now if you try to access, for example, https://mysite.getforge.io/mydata.json you'd likely get a 404 error. Because, after deployment, this file would be located at https://cdn.getforge.com/mysite.getforge.io/12345678/mydata.json.

So you would want to exclude some files from the CDN and tell Forge to stop writing their paths each time, or at very least, handle redirects properly for the uploaded asset.

The Solution

To do this, you can use Forge-Server.

Configuration

Simply add your Forge Server configuration file to the root of your project. This file can be named forgerc.txt, .forgerc, forgerc.json, whichever you prefer.

File Exclusion Example

Files
  robots.txt
  mydata.json
  myFolder/mydata.json

Important: Be careful to ensure that indentation for filenames is added, under Files.

How It Works

When you exclude files from the CDN:

Direct Access: Files remain accessible at their original URLs
No Path Rewriting: Forge stops rewriting paths for excluded files
Proper Redirects: Handles redirects properly for uploaded assets
Search Engine Friendly: robots.txt and other SEO files work correctly

Common Use Cases

Files you might want to exclude from CDN:

robots.txt: Search engine crawling instructions
sitemap.xml: Site structure for search engines
JSON data files: API responses or configuration data
Security files: .well-known directory contents
Custom assets: Files that need specific URL patterns

Benefits

Excluding files from CDN provides several advantages:

Maintain predictable URLs for important files
Ensure search engines can access SEO files
Keep sensitive data files at known locations
Enable proper API endpoint functionality
Support custom file serving requirements

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