Remove index.html suffix

[nihaals]

As most static file servers will automatically serve index.html, it would be nice to have an option where you can use / instead of /index.html

Workaround

if (window.location.href.endsWith("/index.html")) {
  history.replaceState(null, "", window.location.href.slice(0, -10));
}

window.onload = function () {
  const anchors = document.getElementsByTagName("a");

  for (let i = 0; i < anchors.length; i++) {
    if (anchors[i].href.endsWith("/index.html")) {
      anchors[i].href = anchors[i].href.slice(0, -10);
    }
  }
}

[skorokithakis]

On top of that, it would be even better if pages could be generated without an .html suffix at all, ie foo/bar.md would result in foo/bar/index.html.

[d47081]

Is this option has been implemented?

[szabgab]

Not yet.

In my GitHub Action jobs I run the following lines after generating the book:

          perl -i -p -e 's{href="index.html"}{href="."}g'           book/toc.js
          perl -i -p -e 's{(href="[a-zA-Z0-9.][^"]+)\.html"}{$1"}g' book/toc.js
          find book/ -name *.html | xargs perl -i -p -e 's{href="index.html"}{href="."}g'
          find book/ -name *.html | xargs perl -i -p -e 's{(href="[a-zA-Z0-9.][^"]+)\.html"}{$1"}g'

See https://github.com/szabgab/mdbook.code-maven.com/blob/main/.github/workflows/mdbook.yml
for this site https://mdbook.code-maven.com/

[cusma]

@szabgab I think it would be beneficial to address this issue. At the Algorand Foundation, we are currently using mdbook to build the Algorand specifications, which are deployed on Cloudflare (with pretty URLs that lack a .html suffix, causing issues). It would be very convenient to have the option suggested by @skorokithakis.

[randommm]

workaround for now if you are using nginx:

location / {
        if ($request_uri ~ ^/(.*)index\.html(\?|$)) {
            return 302 /$1;
        }
        if ($request_uri ~ ^/(.*)\.html(\?|$)) {
            return 302 /$1;
        }
        try_files $uri $uri.html $uri/ =404;
        ...
    }

and a javascript rewrite:

window.addEventListener("load", (event) => {
    const links = document.querySelectorAll('.sidebar-scrollbox a');
    links.forEach(link => {
        const href = link.getAttribute('href');

        if (href && href.endsWith('index.html')) {
            const cleanHref = href.replace('index.html', '');
            link.setAttribute('href', cleanHref);
        }
        else if (href && href.endsWith('.html') && document.location.host == "yourwebsite.com") {
            const cleanHref = href.replace('.html', '');
            link.setAttribute('href', cleanHref);
        }
    });
});

[jhult]

In case anyone wants to build and test themselves, I have a PR up: #3047