hugo/docs/content/extras/urls.md

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Pretty URLs

By default, Hugo creates content with 'pretty' URLs. For example, content created at /content/extras/urls.md will be rendered at /public/extras/urls/index.html, thus accessible from the browser at http://example.com/extras/urls/. No non-standard server-side configuration is required for these pretty URLs to work.

If you would like to have what we call "ugly URLs", e.g. http://example.com/extras/urls.html, you are in luck. Hugo supports the ability to create your entire site with ugly URLs. Simply add uglyurls = true to your site-wide config.toml, or use the --uglyURLs=true flag on the command line.

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. See Content Organization for more details.

Canonicalization

By default, all relative URLs encountered in the input are left unmodified, e.g. /css/foo.css would stay as /css/foo.css, i.e. canonifyurls defaults to false.

By setting canonifyurls to true, all relative URLs would instead be canonicalized using baseurl. For example, assuming you have baseurl = http://yoursite.example.com/ defined in the site-wide config.toml, the relative URL /css/foo.css would be turned into the absolute URL http://yoursite.example.com/css/foo.css.

Benefits of canonicalization include fixing all URLs to be absolute, which may aid with some parsing tasks. Note though that all real browsers handle this client-side without issues.

Benefits of non-canonicalization include being able to have resource inclusion be scheme-relative, so that http vs https can be decided based on how this page was retrieved.

Note: 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. So, please verify and adjust your website accordingly if you are upgrading from v0.10 or older versions.

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

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 the site configuration will cause Hugo to rewrite all relative URLs to be relative to the current content.

For example, if the /post/first/ page contained a link with a relative URL of /about/, Hugo would rewrite that URL to ../../about/.