Support ugly urls

[kellpossible]

As discussed in #635, it would be nice to have an option similar to Hugo's uglyURLs, to enable pages to be rendered out as /foo.html instead of /foo/index.html, this will have a couple of benefits:

• backwards compatibility when porting another website to zola which uses this url scheme, and for which you wish to keep the old url's alive (I'm currently porting my personal website/blog which was using Pelican and this scheme)
• help support any future efforts to enable for browsing the site on a local file system

[piaoger]

It's quite useful to deploy the static site on cloud stoages directly, such AWS S3, Aliyun OSS ...

[kellpossible]

@piaoger that's quite a strong reason I didn't think of!

[Keats]

The currently URLs should work just fine on S3 if you are not using CloudFront and you can use something like https://github.com/CloudUnder/lambda-edge-nice-urls if you do use it.

[rotty]

I'm not sure if it really fits in with this issue, but I just played around with converting my site to Zola, and ran into an issue which I think is related. I need to create an RSS feed for a specific section, and tried solving it by a using a custom template, based on rss.xml builtin. However, there is no way to force the output to be the desired path; what I'd like to be able to do is something along these lines:

$ ls -1 content/blog/
... index.rss.md ...

Now in index.rss.md, I'd just have frontmatter, like this:

path = "blog/index.rss"
path-verbatim = true # This setting is missing
template = "blog-feed.xml"

If the proposed path-verbatim setting existed, I'd be one step closer to getting where I want; I suspect there would be issues due to RSS feed generation being special-cased, and hence the template not having the information it gets when it is used in "RSS mode", but that is a separate issue.

To generalize a bit, I think it should be possible to make use of the tera engine for non-HTML content, and thus one would need to be able to influence the resulting path name precisely. This would incidentally also solve this issue as raised by @kellpossible, IIUC. However, setting path-verbatim in and path in the frontmatter of each page would probably be less than ideal for that use case, and I imagine some kind of global setting would be a better fit. For my use-case, on the other hand, it is crucial to be able to set this on a per-page basis.

Edit: Alternatively, for my use-case, it would suffice if, when a a template with a non-html extension is specified, that would automatically imply path-verbatim = true. The path-verbatim setting wouldn't even need to exist then. Currently, it seems Zola strips the extension of the specified template, and adds .html instead. Such a solution would do nothing for this issue, however, hence I'll open a new one to discuss non-HTML templates.

[Keats]

Hmm so for that specific usecase I think it would make sense for section to be able to have a rss = true setting that automatically create a RSS feed for that section which could use its own issue.

Let's discuss the rest on #905

[NatTuck]

Not having ugly URLs for pages makes asset colocation weird. For example "foo.md" needs to link to "../thing.txt" to reference an item in the same directory.

[Rantanen]

I was thinking of moving over from Hugo to get better experience when editing Markdown files. Hugo has the problem that its shortcodes use {{<foo name="bar" id="baz">}} syntax that causes issues with normal Markdown preview as everything within the angle brackets gets parsed as a HTML tag.

Zola's choice for shortcodes is better in that regard, but the inability to link to image files with a simple ![Foo][image.png] keeps me away from Zola. Using ../image.png or @/... would work, but breaks the image linking when viewing Markdown preview outside of Zola.

The use case here is internal project documentation that should be easy to consume but also easy to update on the fly, thus Edit this page links everywhere that open the Markdown files in an online Markdown editor.

[Keats]

![Foo][image.png] should work for colocated assets? At least I'm using it in https://github.com/Keats/vincentprouillet/blob/master/content/blog/2018-11-17_releasing-zola-0.5.0/index.md

[Rantanen]

Yeah, co-location is only supported when the Markdown page is called index.md, otherwise images break.

Having a directory for every single page gets noisy when there are several sections with limited amount of pages in each.

But I can appreciate this use case is limited to specific kind of sites and not necessarily applicable to blogs.

[dureuill]

FWIW, I opened a branch with some preliminary support for "ugly urls" in a personal clone of the zola repository: https://github.com/dureuill/zola/tree/page_name_url

I'd open a PR, but the contribution page says something about opening a thread on the forum before opening a feature request PR, and I kind of saw that... after doing most of the work on my branch. TBH this made me unsure of what to do, and lose impetus 😛.

The current branch is able to generate URLs of the type section/foo.html for a Foo page, instead of section/foo by passing the url_mode = pagename config option in config.toml or to zola build/serve.
There might be unexpected interactions with some parts of zola, or just dumb mistakes from my part, I don't know the codebase enough to say for sure.
URLs are only changed for pages, not for sections nor other taxonomies.

BTW I found the zola codebase very clean and easy to hack on, so props to the maintainers 👍.

[Keats]

Honestly I'm not sure enough people want that feature to be worth merging. I've seen quite a few people asking for that just to be actually fine with pretty URLs.

BTW I found the zola codebase very clean and easy to hack on, so props to the maintainers

🙇

[rpearce]

Honestly I'm not sure enough people want that feature to be worth merging. I've seen quite a few people asking for that just to be actually fine with pretty URLs.

I dig zola! It's just what I need, except not having this functionality is a deal-breaker for me to use zola at the moment, unfortunately.

Historically, a number of scraping services (e.g., Twitter & Facebook just a few years ago) had issues with /my_page/index.html when being linked to as just /my_page or even /my_page/. I've built to regular old named HTML files since then and haven't tried emulating regular server routes for static sites.

Separately, and more to my use case, I'm using zola to manage part of a static site, so if the rest of the site uses a my_page.html format everywhere, but this one area doesn't, it's a little weird.

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That said, this project is great, and if it's not worth it to you to add a configuration feature for this, no worries! I appreciate everything you've done already. 💜