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title | linktitle | description | date | publishdate | lastmod | keywords | categories | menu | weight | draft | aliases | toc | |||||||||||||||||
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URL Management | URL Management | Hugo supports permalinks, aliases, link canonicalization, and multiple options for handling relative vs absolute URLs. | 2017-02-01 | 2017-02-01 | 2017-03-09 |
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Permalinks
The default Hugo target directory for your built website is public/
. However, you can change this value by specifying a different publishDir
in your site configuration. The directories created at build time for a section reflect the position of the content's directory within the content
folder and namespace matching its layout within the contentdir
hierarchy.
The permalinks
option in your site configuration allows you to adjust the directory paths (i.e., the URLs) on a per-section basis. This will change where the files are written to and will change the page's internal "canonical" location, such that template references to .RelPermalink
will honor the adjustments made as a result of the mappings in this option.
{{% note "Default Publish and Content Folders" %}}
These examples use the default values for publishDir
and contentDir
; i.e., public
and content
, respectively. You can override the default values in your site's config
file.
{{% /note %}}
For example, if one of your sections is called post
and you want to adjust the canonical path to be hierarchical based on the year, month, and post title, you could set up the following configurations in YAML and TOML, respectively.
YAML Permalinks Configuration Example
{{< code file="config.yml" copy="false" >}} permalinks: post: /:year/:month/:title/ {{< /code >}}
TOML Permalinks Configuration Example
{{< code file="config.toml" copy="false" >}} [permalinks] post = "/:year/:month/:title/" {{< /code >}}
Only the content under post/
will have the new URL structure. For example, the file content/post/sample-entry.md
with date: 2017-02-27T19:20:00-05:00
in its front matter will render to public/2017/02/sample-entry/index.html
at build time and therefore be reachable at https://example.com/2013/11/sample-entry/
.
Permalink Configuration Values
The following is a list of values that can be used in a permalink
definition in your site config
file. All references to time are dependent on the content's date.
:year
- the 4-digit year
:month
- the 2-digit month
:monthname
- the name of the month
:day
- the 2-digit day
:weekday
- the 1-digit day of the week (Sunday = 0)
:weekdayname
- the name of the day of the week
:yearday
- the 1- to 3-digit day of the year
:section
- the content's section
:title
- the content's title
:slug
- the content's slug (or title if no slug is provided in the front matter)
:filename
- the content's filename (without extension)
Aliases
For people migrating existing published content to Hugo, there's a good chance you need a mechanism to handle redirecting old URLs.
Luckily, redirects can be handled easily with aliases in Hugo.
Example: Aliases
Let's assume you create a new piece of content at content/posts/my-awesome-blog-post.md
. The content is a revision of your previous post at content/posts/my-original-url.md
. You can create an aliases
field in the front matter of your new my-awesome-blog-post.md
where you can add previous paths. The following examples show how to create this filed in TOML and YAML front matter, respectively.
TOML Front Matter
{{< code file="content/posts/my-awesome-post.md" copy="false" >}} +++ aliases = [ "/posts/my-original-url/", "/2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html" ] +++ {{< /code >}}
YAML Front Matter
{{< code file="content/posts/my-awesome-post.md" copy="false" >}}
aliases: - /posts/my-original-url/ - /2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html
{{< /code >}}
Now when you visit any of the locations specified in aliases---i.e., assuming the same site domain---you'll be redirected to the page they are specified on. For example, a visitor to example.com/posts/my-original-url/
will be immediately redirected to example.com/posts/my-awesome-blog-post/
.
Example: Aliases in Multilingual
On multilingual sites, each translation of a post can have unique aliases. To use the same alias across multiple languages, prefix it with the language code.
In /posts/my-new-post.es.md
:
---
aliases:
- /es/posts/my-original-post/
---
How Hugo Aliases Work
When aliases are specified, Hugo creates a directory to match the alias entry. Inside the directory, Hugo creates an .html
file specifying the canonical URL for the page and the new redirect target.
For example, a content file at posts/my-intended-url.md
with the following in the front matter:
---
title: My New post
aliases: [/posts/my-old-url/]
---
Assuming a baseURL
of example.com
, the contents of the auto-generated alias .html
found at https://example.com/posts/my-old-url/ will contain the following:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/>
</head>
</html>
The http-equiv="refresh"
line is what performs the redirect, in 0 seconds in this case. If an end user of your website goes to https://example.com/posts/my-old-url
, they will now be automatically redirected to the newer, correct URL. The addition of <meta name="robots" content="noindex">
lets search engine bots know they they should not crawl and index your new alias page.
Customize
You may customize this alias page by creating an alias.html
template in the
layouts folder of your site (i.e., layouts/alias.html
). In this case, the data passed to the template is
Permalink
- the link to the page being aliased
Page
- the Page data for the page being aliased
Important Behaviors of Aliases
- Hugo makes no assumptions about aliases. They also do not change based on your UglyURLs setting. You need to provide absolute paths to your web root and the complete filename or directory.
- Aliases are rendered before any content are rendered and therefore will be overwritten by any content with the same location.
Pretty URLs
Hugo's default behavior is to render your content with "pretty" URLs. No non-standard server-side configuration is required for these pretty URLs to work.
The following demonstrates the concept:
content/posts/_index.md
=> example.com/posts/index.html
content/posts/post-1.md
=> example.com/posts/post-1/
Ugly URLs
If you would like to have what are often referred to as "ugly URLs" (e.g., example.com/urls.html), set uglyurls = true
or uglyurls: true
in your site's config.toml
or config.yaml
, respectively. You can also use the --uglyURLs=true
flag from the command line with hugo
or hugo server
..
If you want a specific piece of content to have an exact URL, you can specify this in the front matter under the url
key. The following are examples of the same content directory and what the eventual URL structure will be when Hugo runs with its default behavior.
See Content Organization for more details on paths.
.
└── content
└── about
| └── _index.md // <- https://example.com/about/
├── post
| ├── firstpost.md // <- https://example.com/post/firstpost/
| ├── happy
| | └── ness.md // <- https://example.com/post/happy/ness/
| └── secondpost.md // <- https://example.com/post/secondpost/
└── quote
├── first.md // <- https://example.com/quote/first/
└── second.md // <- https://example.com/quote/second/
Here's the same organization run with hugo --uglyURLs
:
.
└── content
└── about
| └── _index.md // <- https://example.com/about/index.html
├── post
| ├── firstpost.md // <- https://example.com/post/firstpost.html
| ├── happy
| | └── ness.md // <- https://example.com/post/happy/ness.html
| └── secondpost.md // <- https://example.com/post/secondpost.html
└── quote
├── first.md // <- https://example.com/quote/first.html
└── second.md // <- https://example.com/quote/second.html
Canonicalization
By default, all relative URLs encountered in the input are left unmodified, e.g. /css/foo.css
would stay as /css/foo.css
. The canonifyURLs
field in your site config
has a default value of false
.
By setting canonifyURLs
to true
, all relative URLs would instead be canonicalized using baseURL
. For example, assuming you have baseURL = https://example.com/
, the relative URL /css/foo.css
would be turned into the absolute URL https://example.com/css/foo.css
.
Benefits of canonicalization include fixing all URLs to be absolute, which may aid with some parsing tasks. Note, however, that all modern browsers handle this on the client without issue.
Benefits of non-canonicalization include being able to have scheme-relative resource inclusion; e.g., so that http
vs https
can be decided according to how the page was retrieved.
{{% note "canonifyURLs
default change" %}}
In the May 2014 release of Hugo v0.11, the default value of canonifyURLs
was switched from true
to false
, which we think is the better default and should continue to be the case going forward. Please verify and adjust your website accordingly if you are upgrading from v0.10 or older versions.
{{% /note %}}
To find out the current value of canonifyURLs
for your website, you may use the handy hugo config
command added in v0.13.
hugo config | grep -i canon
Or, if you are on Windows and do not have grep
installed:
hugo config | FINDSTR /I canon
Override URLS with Front Matter
In addition to specifying permalink values in your site configuration for different content sections, Hugo provides even more granular control for individual pieces of content.
Both slug
and url
can be defined in individual front matter. For more information on content destinations at build time, see Content Organization.
Relative URLs
By default, all relative URLs are left unchanged by Hugo, which can be problematic when you want to make your site browsable from a local file system.
Setting relativeURLs
to true
in your site configuration will cause Hugo to rewrite all relative URLs to be relative to the current content.
For example, if your /post/first/
page contains a link to /about/
, Hugo will rewrite the URL to ../../about/
.