URL issue for top-level pages

[zakgreene]

My website utilizes subpages for each top-level page. Whenever I build my site, all my top-level pages take the URL http://localhost/section.html, while my subpages take the URL http://localhost/section/subpage.html. I want the section index pages to take the form http://localhost/section/index.html. Since this would appear to be a common issue and I don't see any documentation of it, I'm afraid I might be missing something. For now I am manually moving the generated pages to the proper folder and renaming them index.html. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[fvsch]

Hi,

StaticBuilder has the staticbuilder.extension config:

c::set('staticbuilder.extension', '.html');       // my/page.html
c::set('staticbuilder.extension', '/index.html'); // my/page/index.html

If you use '/index.html', you will get the result you expect for section pages. But it will also apply to subpages, so you will get static/section/subpage/index.html and not static/section/subpage.html. There is no built-in way to treat those pages differently.

So your options are:

1. c::set('staticbuilder.extension', '.html'); /* default */
static/section.html and static/section/subpage.html

2. c::set('staticbuilder.extension', '/index.html');
static/section/index.html and static/section/subpage/index.html

With the appropriate server configuration, the first one gives you URLs that look like this: /section and /section/subpage; and the second one gives you URLs that look like: /section/ and /section/subpage/.

[zakgreene]

Ok, thanks. I did add Options +Multiviews to the .htaccess file as suggested, but that didn't cause /section/ URLs to open the section.html pages. Instead, they opened the index of the folder. Do you know of any Apache headers that would fix this?

[fvsch]

That would be the Indexes option.

Options -Indexes +Multiviews

Note that it will disable folder listings but it will not fix your issue, because you’re requesting /section/, which cannot map to [WEB ROOT]/section.html. So if you disable the folder listing (which you should do anyway), you will get a 404.

You need to pick a URL scheme:

/section
/section/subpage

or:

/section/
/section/subpage/

The first one should work out of the box with Kirby and StaticBuilder's default options. The second one can be trickier because Kirby uses /page/subpage for URLs. If you want trailing slashes, you have to put them explicitely in your templates, e.g.

<a href="<?= $somePage->url() ?>/">
  <?= $somePage->title() ?>
</a>

[zakgreene]

Hmm. For some reason, even with -Indexes set, my server wants to redirect /section.html to /section/. My links all have URLs without the trailing slash. I'm on MediaTemple's Grid.

Incidentally, I'm having some issues linking embedded image files. I'm using Kirbytext syntax (image: infographic.jpg link: infographic.jpg) to have an image open itself when clicked, yet the URLs are coming out wrong. I have staticbuilder.baseurl set to '/2016/'. I had to add a trailing slash to get my URLs to come out right, though your docs suggest I don't need it. Here is the site, for reference, and here is an example of the linked image embed not working.

[fvsch]

@zakgreene I can reproduce the issue. Problem is that if you have these files:

static/my-section.html
static/my-section/subpage.html

And request /my-section, Apache will try to serve the directory and not the HTML page with the same name.

There are a few solutions using a .htaccess and URL rewriting. I’m trying a few things to figure out what could be a decent default config.

[zakgreene]

Yep, that's exactly it. Thanks for working on it.

[fvsch]

One possible fix is using a .htaccess file like this one:

https://github.com/fvsch/kirby-staticbuilder/blob/master/test/static_htaccess

Which you could save as e.g. site/staticbuilder/htaccess, and copy it on build:

c::set('staticbuilder.assets', [
  'assets' => 'assets',
  'content' => 'content',
  'thumbs' => 'thumbs',
  'site/staticbuilder/htaccess' => '.htaccess'
]);

It’s a bit of a heavy solution, so I’m considering changing the default extension to /index.html in the next major version of StaticBuilder.

[zakgreene]

Do you know of a way to make it work if the entire site is in a subfolder? The only way I can think of now is to add Redirect /index.html /2016/index.html (where /2016 is my subfolder), but then I'd have to change all my homepage URLs to http://localhost/2016/index.html.

[fvsch]

Do you know of a way to make it work if the entire site is in a subfolder?

Can you elaborate what you mean by “make it work” in that sentence?

[zakgreene]

With the settings you provided, links to the homepage don't work when the entire website uses a subfolder. I either have to link directly to subfolder/index.html, or move the homepage to the root directory and name it subfolder.html. Neither of these is ideal. I don't know much about .htaccess, so I wondered whether there was a way to exempt /subfolder from the rewrite rules.

[fvsch]

# Redirect "/something/" to "/something"
# Warning: only enable if serving the site at the root of a domain or subdomain,
# e.g. https://my.site.com/ or http://localhost/
# Otherwise it will redirect "/site/root/" to "/site/root", which can be a problem.
RedirectMatch (.+?)/+$ $1

You probably want to comment or remove that section.

[zakgreene]

This worked for me — sorry for the late reply.