Links without .html extension with no need to create directories

Question

I am running website on Jekyll. I want to make links, like contact to contact.md (now I am using contact.html link) - that means I want to remove .html extension. I read this question - How to link to a page with page.url without the html extension in Jekyll?, but it tells to create directory for each folder. I do not like this idea - I want to have everything in one, main directory. Can you give my any advice?

Answer 1

That is correct. A static site always has to have a page to render. Most web servers are configured to look for index.html if you specify a directory.

If you were using an application server, like Unicorn, and serving dynamic then you can handle requests however you want, but web servers like Nginx and Apache will look for files on disk.

Thus:

example.com/contact.html

would actually become:

example.com/contact/index.html

But you could omit the filename, and the web server will figure it out:

example.com/contact

Answer 2

permalink is your solution.

See my answer here for short explanation.

Answer 3

You can set up permalink handling in Jekyll any way you want. First, look into Jekyll's built-in permalink support where a format of (just for example)

permalink: blah/:title

Or

permalink: /:categories/:title

will convince Jekyll to start emitting extensionless permalinks. Then to clean up the wasteful /foo/index.html structures created by Jekyll under that scheme, use something like Will Norris's jekyll-clean-urls (or my own jekyll-simple-urls for a more primitive approach). The basic idea there is to selectively replace /foo/index.html with /foo.html as needed.

module Jekyll
   class Post
       # Obtain destination path, using clean URLs if requested.
       #
       # By default, Jekyll will treat /:title permalinks the same as /:title/,
       # using a destination file of /:title/index.html.  Instead, we change the
       # destination file to /:title.html if clean URLs are requested.
    def destination_with_clean_urls(dest)
       path = destination_without_clean_urls(dest)
      path.sub!(/\/index.html$/, '.html') if clean_urls?(permalink)
      path
    end

    alias_method :destination_without_clean_urls, :destination
    alias_method :destination, :destination_with_clean_urls

Then you can use MultiViews or a simple rewrite (or go full-hog and serve extensionless HTML files) to make sure that requests for /foo yield /foo.html. If you're using jekyll serve or the connect middleware through Yeoman you'll need to make a couple additional tweaks but that's the idea.