Setting up netlify.toml for pretty url

[luisrieke]

I added a configuration file for the first time.

Added the following code:

[build.processing.html]
  pretty_urls = true

[[redirects]]
  from = "/running.html"
  to = "/running"

I want that URLs never show .html

Both ways did not work.

The netlify.toml is in the root directory.
Anything else which I maybe made the wrong way?

Thank you for your help!

[nathanmartin]

@luisrieke Do you have links that point to your URLs with .html as the suffix?

The default behaviour of Netlify would be that if you had a file /running.html that it would be accessible from /running.

See the note here about a file at /blog.html:

[Support Guide] How can I alter trailing slash behaviour in my URLs? Will enabling Pretty URLs help?

Last reviewed by Netlify Support Staff May 2023 First Steps Depending on how you configure your site, you may be served either www.example.com/about or www.example.com/about/ – so, what’s easiest? What’s best? What’s the way to make this behaviour match what you want it to do? One source notes: Theoretically a URL with a trailing slash implies a directory and a URL without a trailing slash is a file, but this isn’t really important anymore. Although it may not be important, it’s a good rul…

[luisrieke]

Hey @nathanmartin thank you so much for your quick reply

You’re right, it is accessible but just wondered if there is a way to automatically redirect if there’s a .html in the end of the URL. After all, you’re right, it works like that and I can access everything without .html. But would be even cooler if it’s just not possible to open .html files without a redirect. I thought that is what Asset optimization > Pretty URLs is doing?

[hrishikesh]

Pretty URLs does that, if it’s not working, please share your site name.

[luisrieke]

Books I like So there’s no redirect for example - no big deal, but if there’s an easy fix that would be amazing!

[amelia]

Hey @luisrieke , I took a look at your site and it does look like the Pretty URLs are working as expected. What I tried was going to your main/home page here [https://luisrieke.com/] and then I clicked on the “running” link, and the URL showed as Luis Rieke - running – is this what you’re expecting?

If you are seeing a specific page or link which is not working as you expect, can you share the URL for that page so we can investigate further?

[nathanmartin]

I believe part of the confusion here is whether or not the ‘Asset optimization - Pretty URLs’ is supposed to apply any redirection of a users request for a file.

My understanding, based on the description written under it, is that it scans and changes your HTML to remove references to URLs ending in .html, so if you had a link of href="/about.html", it would adjust your code to href="/about".

What @luisrieke is questioning is that if a user is directly accessing a file with the .html extension in the URL, a file which does exist, is it possible to redirect them to the Pretty URL for that same file.

Example: Going directly to https://luisrieke.com/running.html loads /running.html and doesn’t redirect to /running

I’m not sure I’ve ever tried, but I imagine due to shadowing any redirect for it would need to include force.

So perhaps the equivalent of:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/running.html"
  to = "/running"
  force = true

[luisrieke]

Thank you so much! I understood and now correctly implemented