A Metalsmith plugin that applies a custom permalink pattern to files, and renames them so that they're nested properly for static sites (converting about.html into about/index.html).

$ npm install metalsmith-permalinks

var Metalsmith = require('metalsmith');
var permalinks = require('metalsmith-permalinks');

var metalsmith = new Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(permalinks({
    pattern: ':title'
  }));

The pattern can contain a reference to any piece of metadata associated with the file by using the :PROPERTY syntax for placeholders.

If no pattern is provided, the files won't be remapped, but the path metadata key will still be set, so that you can use it for outputting links to files in the template.

By default any date will be converted to a YYYY/MM/DD format when using in a permalink pattern, but you can change the conversion by passing a date option:

metalsmith.use(permalinks({
  pattern: ':date/:title',
  date: 'YYYY'
}));

It uses moment.js to format the string.

When this plugin rewrites your files to be permalinked properly, it will also duplicate sibling files so that relative links like /images/cat.gif will be preserved nicely. You can turn this feature off by setting the relative option to false.

For example for this source directory:

src/
  css/
    style.css
  post.html

Here's what the build directory would look like with relative on:

build/
  post/
    index.html
    css/
      style.css
  css/
    style.css

And here's with relative off:

build/
  post/
    index.html
  css/
    style.css

A file can be ignored by the metalsmith-permalinks plugin if you pass the permalink: false option to the yaml metadata of a file. This is useful for hosting a static site on AWS S3, where there is a top level error.html file and not an error/index.html file.

For example, in your error.md file:

---
template: error.html
title: error
permalink: false
---

You can also use the plugin with the Metalsmith CLI by adding a key to your metalsmith.json file:

{
  "plugins": {
    "metalsmith-permalinks": {
      "pattern": ":title"
    }
  }
}

MIT