Issue with "pretty" URLs on GitLab.com

Having trouble with the "pretty" URLs setting and custom URLs.

Seems like GitLab.com is expecting pages under a site to have the .html extension for all pages, but you can configure Jekyll to not create pages with the .html extension. I'm trying to migrate this from GitHub Pages which has this functionality, and I'd like to keep it if possible since it's my existing link structure which has already been indexed by search engines and stuff.

Example using my own blog:

• Config file that uses URLs without the .html extension: https://gitlab.com/afolson/afolson.gitlab.io/blob/master/_config.yml#L15
• This link should work but 404s: http://afolson.gitlab.io/blog/2016/08/19/laracon-2016
• This link works: http://afolson.gitlab.io/blog/2016/08/19/laracon-2016.html

A clean install that I made tonight just to make sure I didn't break my site:

• Config file to use URLs without .html extension: https://gitlab.com/IncrediBL/incredibl.gitlab.io/blob/master/_config.yml#L19
• This link should work but 404s: http://incredibl.gitlab.io/blog/2016/08/19/welcome-to-jekyll
• This link works: http://incredibl.gitlab.io/blog/2016/08/19/welcome-to-jekyll.html

(Note that if you visit http://incredibl.gitlab.io/ and try to visit the blog post by clicking on the link it will 404 -- this is because I was too lazy to update the template, not because Pages is busted.)

The Jekyll docs have some more infomation on this: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/permalinks/#extensionless-permalinks

This might be user error on my end, if so please educate me! :P

+1 I'm having this exact same issue and it would be really good to have extensionless permalinks working

You can add permalink: pretty to your _config.yml file. Then whenever you set a permalink (e.g. permalink: about-us/) make sure you add a trailing "/". That should build your page as /about-us/index.html instead of about-us.html. Now you should be able to visit /about-us/ without 404ing.

Hi Jim. The issue is that using the "pretty" setting and setting the permalink properly doesn't work. It appears to be an issue on the GitLab side.

Hi Amanda, thanks for the reply. Sorry if I'm missing the key issue, but does it work if you add a "/" to the end of your permalink like this: https://gitlab.com/prettyurls/demo/blob/master/_config.yml#L35

Demo: http://prettyurls.gitlab.io/demo/

Nah, I tried both and it still 404s :/ I'm forced to use whatever.com/thing/index.html as the URL. It wouldn't be a huge deal, but my blog has some articles with a decent page rank and I'm hesitant to break the URLs. Thanks for posting the work around! It might be useful to someone -- fully willing to concede that this is a problem of my own creation with a weird blog setup.

I use permalink: :title on my blog. I just moved from github pages to gitlab. And this breaks every single page! Slightly annoying. Is there a way around that people have found that works?

Example:

• http://connorshea.gitlab.io/blog/css-that-doesnt-suck does not work
• http://connorshea.github.io/blog/css-that-doesnt-suck does work
• http://connorshea.gitlab.io/blog/css-that-doesnt-suck.html does work

Source: https://gitlab.com/connorshea/connorshea.gitlab.io

@afolson would this work for you? https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson

Blog posts:

• https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson/blog/2016/08/19/laracon-2016
• https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson/blog/2015/06/08/twenty-years-of-php
• https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson/blog/2015/06/01/velocity-2015

Edit: Oh I see now, you don't want the /index.html extension. I just spun down https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson in case anyone tries clicking those links. In the examples above, those URLs worked fine, but in reality /index.html is appended to the end (e.g. https://prettyurls.gitlab.io/afolson/blog/2015/06/01/velocity-2015/index.html)

Hey Jim,

Yeah the issue is that my blog has a few posts that still get a decent amount of traffic, so I'm hesitant to change the URL structure of things just in case it causes those posts to lose rank. It sounds nitpicky, I know haha. There are workarounds but it ultimately changes the URL in some way. I really appreciate you looking into this!

I just stumbled upon this behavior as well. My local jekyll build was working fine, while failing on gitlab. It took me a significant amount of time to even find this problem (and this thread) So if you use permalinks for your posts/pages you need to have trailing slash in the end - otherwise it does not work without .html extension. Can this be fixed?

Ehm. So is there something happening to solve it?

Before - works on local, not on our gitlab server:

• file.md: [relative link to file2](file2)
• file2.md: ...
• _config.yml: permalink: /:collection/:path
• generated html: base/collection-name/file.html
• url: base/collection-name/file - works locally, NOT on server
• url: base/collection-name/file.html - works locally AND on server

It was brilliant I can write the link to other files in the same collection directory by just using their name in the md file.

Now this - works on local, on server too:

• file.md: [relative link to file2](../file2)
• file2.md: ...
• _config.yml: permalink: /:collection/:path/
• generated html: base/collection-name/file.html
• url: base/collection-name/file/ - works locally, AND on server
• url: base/collection-name/file.html - works locally AND on server

I hate to add ../ part to all the links. Why should I? Is there some workaround for this?

I get it now. The correct way is to have

[file]({{ site.baseurl }}/file.html)
and 
[collection file]({{ site.baseurl }}/collection/file)

As any other way you can not be sure what path you are accessing as they are relative from the currently opened page.

It seems this issue is actually not a problem in this project, but is https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-pages/issues/9