Option to remove trailing slash

Currently, GH pages work like this:

1. Request /about
2. Nginx rewrite request to /about/
3. Fetch /about/index.html and send it back

Is it possible to add an option to enable the reverse behavior, e.g., favoring links like /about over /about/?

Behavior would be:

1. Request /about/
2. Nginx rewrite request to /about
3. Fetch /about/index.html and send it back

If the request is /about, fetch /about/index.html and send it back.

The current flow is if /about is a directory you will get redirect to /about/, it is done, because how relative links are solved. And this is also something that I see that it's a common pattern and I would not like to change that.

I'm thinking about something different. Maybe we should support /about to be an alias of /about.html? This would solve your problem, but would also not break relative links :)

@axil I think that it does make sense, what do you think? :)

@ayufan That's a neat idea :) @octref what's your use case?

@axil @ayufan

That's a good idea. I'm using Hugo, and I organize my posts like

content/
  write/
    post/
      1/
        index.md
        top.img

Now in index.md I could use ![](top.img) to easily add the image. If you make this change, I'd need to change that index.md to content/write/post/1.md, and it'll be a bit harder for me to manage the images. But I can move all images to /static.

Overall I like the idea, and it would be awesome if you could provide it as an option. Thanks!

@octref It doesn't make sense to make it as an option, it should be default :)

Maybe you could try to hack the sources and add that?

You would need to modify this function testing the .html: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-pages/blob/master/domain.go#L106

If it's default, be careful let /about check for /about.html, and if it fails, redirect to /about/ and check for /about/index.html.

Do you mean let me work on it or @axil ?

The flow should be like this:

if /about => if dir => redirect to /about/
if /about => if file => serve
if /about/ => if /about/index.html file => serve
if /about.html => serve
otherwise 404

@ayufan Now that some sites have been serving from /about/, there are links from other websites to those URLs with trailing slashes.

I propose that a request for "/about/" is 301 redirected to "/about" if the sub-folder doesn't exist, but an about.html file does.

I'm not sure about doing such redirect. Maybe lets start with implementing the above proposal first and then see if we need something else :)

Ok, I'll let you know when the links to my blog break. ;)

@ayufan's proposal above looks great as far as I can tell from my Jekyll experience. Can't wait for this, thanks!

@perflexive If you don't change anything it will still work, because this change is backward compatible :)

But if I do change it to remove the slash - like I wanted to do originally - wont existing links into my site break?

(It's not a hug deal. I'm ok with a few broken links if it means no trailing slash, it's just less than ideal)

@perflexive Then yes :)

Hey, any progress on this feature?

Surge's clean URL rule could be a reference as to how it could be done.

Just wanted to check in on this issue. Surge's clean URL rules mentioned by @octref is exactly the functionality I am hoping for.

Any more progress on this issue? This feature seems hugely in demand, especially among Jekyll users. As has been stated repeatedly, this is standard behavior on both GitHub Pages and Jekyll's built-in server.

Thank you for creatinge Gitlab Pages! Well, somehow Github Pages supports serving about.html to url /about, and can Gitlab support that? It makes the website's url look cleaner, and the users won't see 404 when they type in example.com/about

mentioned in issue pages/jekyll#6

Note that Netlify provides GitLab integration and doesnt have this bug.