Permalinks refer to the URLs (excluding the domain name or directory folder) for your pages, posts, or collections. Jekyll supports a flexible way to build permalinks, allowing you to leverage various template variables or choose built-in permalink styles (such as date) that automatically use a template-variable pattern.
You construct permalinks by creating a template URL where dynamic elements are represented by colon-prefixed keywords. The default template permalink is /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title.html. Each of the colon-prefixed keywords is a template variable.
You can configure your site’s permalinks through the Configuration file or in the Front Matter for each post, page, or collection.
Setting permalink styles in your configuration file applies the setting globally in your project. You configure permalinks in your _config.yml file like this:
permalink: /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title.html
If you don’t specify any permalink setting, Jekyll uses the above pattern as the default.
The permalink can also be set using a built-in permalink style:
permalink: date
date is the same as :categories/:year/:month/:day/:title.html, the default. See Built-in Permalink Styles below for more options.
Setting the permalink in your post, page, or collection’s front matter overrides any global settings. Here’s an example:
--- title: My page title permalink: /mypageurl/ ---
Even if your configuration file specifies the date style, the URL for this page would be http://somedomain.com/mypageurl/.
When you use permalinks that omit the .html file extension (called “pretty URLs”) Jekyll builds the file as index.html placed inside a folder with the page’s name. For example:
├── mypageurl │ └── index.html
With a URL such as /mypageurl/, servers automatically load the index.html file inside the folder, so users can simply navigate to http://somedomain.com/mypageurl/ to get to mypageurl/index.html.
The following table lists the template variables available for permalinks. You can use these variables in the permalink property in your config file.
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
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| Year from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Month from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Month without leading zeros from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Day from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Day without leading zeros from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| _ Day of the year from the post's filename, with leading zeros. |
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| Year without the century from the post's filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Hour of the day, 24-hour clock, zero-padded from the post's |
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| Minute of the hour from the post's |
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| Second of the minute from the post's |
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| Title from the document’s filename. May be overridden via the document’s |
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| Slugified title from the document’s filename (any character except numbers and letters is replaced as hyphen). May be overridden via the document’s |
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| The specified categories for this post. If a post has multiple categories, Jekyll will create a hierarchy (e.g. |
Note that all template variables relating to time or categories are available to posts only.
Although you can specify a custom permalink pattern using template variables, Jekyll also provides the following built-in styles for convenience.
| Permalink Style | URL Template |
|---|---|
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Rather than typing permalink: /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title/, you can just type permalink: pretty.
Specifying permalinks through the YAML Front Matter
Built-in permalink styles are not recognized in YAML Front Matter. As a result,
permalink: prettywill not work.
Here are a few examples to clarify how permalink styles get applied with posts.
Given a post named: /2009-04-29-slap-chop.md
| URL Template | Resulting Permalink URL |
|---|---|
| None specified, or |
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See Extensionless permalinks with no trailing slashes for details. |
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The permalink setting in your configuration file specifies the permalink style used for posts, pages, and collections. However, because pages and collections don’t have time or categories, these aspects of the permalink style are ignored with pages and collections.
For example:
/:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title.:output_ext for posts becomes /:title.html for pages and collections.pretty (or /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title/), which omits the file extension and contains a trailing slash, will update page and collection permalinks to also omit the file extension and contain a trailing slash: /:title/.date, which contains a trailing file extension, will update page permalinks to also contain a trailing file extension: /:title.html. But no time or category information will be included.The path to the post or page in the built site differs for posts, pages, and collections:
The subfolders into which you may have organized your posts inside the _posts directory will not be part of the permalink.
If you use a permalink style that omits the .html file extension, each post is rendered as an index.html file inside a folder with the post’s name (for example, categoryname/2016/12/01/mypostname/index.html).
Unlike posts, pages by default mimic the source directory structure exactly. (The only exception is if your page has a permalink declared its front matter — in that case, the structure honors the permalink setting instead of the source folder structure.)
As with posts, if you use a permalink style that omits the .html file extension, each page is rendered as an index.html file inserted inside a folder with the page’s name (for example, mypage/index.html).
By default, collections follow a similar structure in the _site folder as pages, except that the path is prefaced by the collection name. For example: collectionname/mypage.html. For permalink settings that omit the file extension, the path would be collection_name/mypage/index.html.
Collections have their own way of setting permalinks. Additionally, collections have unique template variables available (such as path and output_ext). See the Configuring permalinks for collections in Collections for more information.
If you want to flatten your pages (pull them out of subfolders) in the _site directory when your site builds (similar to posts), add the permalink property to the front matter of each page, with no path specified:
--- title: My page permalink: mypageurl.html ---
Jekyll supports permalinks that contain neither a trailing slash nor a file extension, but this requires additional support from the web server to properly serve. When using these types of permalinks, output files written to disk will still have the proper file extension (typically .html), so the web server must be able to map requests without file extensions to these files.
Both GitHub Pages and the Jekyll’s built-in WEBrick server handle these requests properly without any additional work.
The Apache web server has extensive support for content negotiation and can handle extensionless URLs by setting the multiviews option in your httpd.conf or .htaccess file:
Options +MultiViewsThe try_files directive allows you to specify a list of files to search for to process a request. The following configuration will instruct nginx to search for a file with an .html extension if an exact match for the requested URI is not found.
try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;You can create links in your topics to other posts, pages, or collection items in a way that is valid no matter what permalink configuration you choose. By using the link tag, if you change your permalinks, your links won’t break. See Linking to pages in Templates for more details.
© 2008–2018 Tom Preston-Werner and Jekyll contributors
Licensed under the MIT license.
https://jekyllrb.com/docs/permalinks/