`hugo server` should check for /foo.html when requesting /foo

[octref]

I'm using https://surge.sh/ to deploy my hugo site. It has a great clean url feature, so if you have /foo.html, /foo will get it, /foo/ will redirect to /foo.

So now I'm creating content/foo.md, and enabling uglyurls so hugo generates /foo.html.

In some pages, such as listing page, I'm now using {{ trim .RelPermalink ".html" }} to use clean url in href. However, this causes problem with hugo server. A request of /foo doesn't check the existence of /foo.html, but directs to /foo/ to try /foo/index.html immediately.

[octref]

@anthonyfok Hey I'm interested in doing this myself, but I don't have much experience with golang. or hugo. Would you mind giving me a pointer as to where to start?

[bep]

@octref this issue is in the category of "we should most likely not do this", and if so only if it is really simple and someone is providing a finished solution for it. Teaching you Golang doesn't fit that bill.

[octref]

@bep I understand that. Just want to know where to start. Guess I'll look into https://github.com/spf13/hugo/blob/master/commands/server.go and how net/http fileserver handles request.

Just wondering, is it that you are against this feature?
If not, are you OK if I do it this way?

/foo serves /foo.html if it's available. If not, directs to /foo/ and behave like it is before.

[octref]

Knowing "we should most likely not do this" is useful as I can possibly avoid the awkward situation where I take time to do a PR and you don't want this feature at all.

Also saw your comment at #874:

@rustyoz I agree, but I still feels that the FileServer devs should have made this extensible in the first place. When they sober up from GopherCon I will post an issue; but that will be Go 1.6 at best.

I guess this discussion can hold until we decide what to do about a REST api.

So as for approach to this problem:

• Is FileServer made extensible now go is 1.7?
• Does hugo need to take dep on https://github.com/julienschmidt/httprouter to implement this feature?
• Or is it you are doing the REST api(didn't see it in code, and didn't find it on roadmap)?

[octref]

Guess I'll should switch back to jekyll.

[carlmjohnson]

I'm not sure I understand this feature request.

Is it that you want the page URL to be /a/ but you want the filename to be /a.html instead of /a/index.html so your provider will do redirects? If so, there's no need to adjust Hugo. Just write a script (could be in any language, doesn't have to be Go) to move /a/index.html to /a.html after you've done a build with Hugo, since it's really about the final file locations, not the URL as Hugo understands them.