Confused by Pretty Url behavior

#1

Hello,

I’m confused at what the Pretty Url is supposed to be doing. Or more specifically, what is Netlify default behavior when this option is not enabled.

I have a website available at https://gamemaster.pixelastic.com/ (which actually serves https://gamemaster-pixelastic.netlify.com/).

I have created a test.html file at the root of this website. From my test, the file is accessible through:

  1. https://gamemaster.pixelastic.com/test.html and https://gamemaster-pixelastic.netlify.com/test.html, which is expected.
  2. https://gamemaster.pixelastic.com/test/, https://gamemaster.pixelastic.com/test, https://gamemaster-pixelastic.netlify.com/test/ and https://gamemaster-pixelastic.netlify.com/test

The first one is expected, but I thought the urls in 2. would only be redirected if I had enabled Pretty Url (which I don’t):

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So what exactly is checking Pretty Url supposed to be doing? I didn’t find any page explaining it in the documentation and the short explanation text close to the checkbox seems to describe what is already the current behavior

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#2

hi there, did you see this blog article?

let us know if you need more specific information and we can dig in a bit deeper.

#3

Hey, thanks for the link. I didn’t know I could trigger those settings from my netlify.toml file, that good news.

Still, I didn’t find any information on the Pretty URL feature. What does it add that Netlify does do out of the box? In my tests, you already normalize /foo, /foo/ and /foo.html to serve the same files.

So what other url rewriting do I get if I enable Pretty Urls?

#4

When you enable Pretty URLs, our system will also rewrite the links in your html to remove the html extension. This is mentioned in our redirects docs.

#5

Oh ok, thanks! So it’s actually rewriting the content of the page itself, and not adding any new redirect rules.

Thanks for the clarification!