Permalinks

Permalinks are the output path for your pages, posts, or collections. They allow you to structure the directories of your source code different from the directories in your output.

Front Matter

The simplest way to set a permalink is using front matter. You set the permalink variable in front matter to the output path you’d like.

For example, you might have a page on your site located at /my_pages/about-me.html and you want the output url to be /about/. In front matter of the page you would set:

---
permalink: /about/
---

Global

Setting a permalink in front matter for every page on your site is no fun. Luckily, Bridgetown lets you set the permalink structure globally in your bridgetown.config.yml.

To set a global permalink, you use the permalink variable in bridgetown.config.yml. You can use placeholders to your desired output. For example:

permalink: /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title:output_ext

Note that pages and collections (excluding posts and drafts) don’t have time and categories (for pages, the above :title is equivalent to :basename), these aspects of the permalink style are ignored for the output.

For example, a permalink style of /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title:output_ext for the posts collection becomes /:title.html for pages and collections (excluding posts and drafts).

Placeholders

Here’s the full list of placeholders available:

Variable	Description
`year`	Year from the post’s filename with four digits. May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`short_year`	Year from the post’s filename without the century. (00..99) May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`month`	Month from the post’s filename. (01..12) May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`i_month`	Month without leading zeros from the post’s filename. May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`short_month`	Three-letter month abbreviation, e.g. “Jan”.
`long_month`	Full month name, e.g. “January”.
`day`	Day of the month from the post’s filename. (01..31) May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`i_day`	Day of the month without leading zeros from the post’s filename. May be overridden via the document’s `date` front matter.
`y_day`	Ordinal day of the year from the post’s filename, with leading zeros. (001..366)
`w_year`	Week year which may differ from the month year for up to three days at the start of January and end of December
`week`	Week number of the current year, starting with the first week having a majority of its days in January. (01..53)
`w_day`	Day of the week, starting with Monday. (1..7)
`short_day`	Three-letter weekday abbreviation, e.g. “Sun”.
`long_day`	Weekday name, e.g. “Sunday”.
`hour`	Hour of the day, 24-hour clock, zero-padded from the post’s `date` front matter. (00..23)
`minute`	Minute of the hour from the post’s `date` front matter. (00..59)
`second`	Second of the minute from the post’s `date` front matter. (00..59)
`title`	Title from the document’s filename. May be overridden via the document’s `slug` front matter.
`slug`	Slugified title from the document’s filename (any character except numbers and letters is replaced as hyphen). May be overridden via the document’s `slug` front matter.
`categories`	The specified categories for this post. If a post has multiple categories, Bridgetown will create a hierarchy (e.g. `/category1/category2`). Also Bridgetown automatically parses out double slashes in the URLs, so if no categories are present, it will ignore this.

Built-in formats

For posts, Bridgetown also provides the following built-in styles for convenience:

Permalink Style	URL Template
`date`	`/:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title:output_ext`
`pretty`	`/:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title/`
`simple`	`/:categories/:title/`
`ordinal`	`/:categories/:year/:y_day/:title:output_ext`
`weekdate`	`/:categories/:year/W:week/:short_day/:title:output_ext`
`none`	`/:categories/:title:output_ext`

Rather than typing permalink: /:categories/:year/:month/:day/:title/, you can just type permalink: pretty.

Collections

For collections (including posts and drafts), you have the option to override the global permalink in the collection configuration in bridgetown.config.yml:

collections:
  my_collection:
    output: true
    permalink: /:collection/:name

Collections have the following placeholders available:

Variable	Description
`:collection`	Label of the containing collection.
`:path`	Path to the document relative to the collection's directory, including base filename of the document.
`:name`	The document's base filename, with every sequence of spaces and non-alphanumeric characters replaced by a hyphen.
`:title`	The `:title` template variable will take the `slug` front matter variable value if any is present in the document; if none is defined then `:title` will be equivalent to `:name`, aka the slug generated from the filename.
`:output_ext`	Extension of the output file. (Included by default and usually unnecessary.)

Pages

For pages, you have to use front matter to override the global permalink, and if you set a permalink via front matter defaults in bridgetown.config.yml, it will be ignored.

Pages have the following placeholders available:

Variable	Description
`:path`	Path to the page relative to the site's source directory, excluding base filename of the page.
`:basename`	The page's base filename
`:output_ext`	Extension of the output file. (Included by default and usually unnecessary.)

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