Page files

Pages are the files that are loaded, processed and saved in your site. You can create pages using different formats (md, js, ts, jsx, tsx, yml, etc), but the simplest way is by adding a Markdown file in the root directory with a suitable filename and .md as the extension. Lume will load these files and generate HTML pages with them:

.
├── index.md     => /index.html
├── about.md     => /about/index.html
└── contact.md   => /contact/index.html

You can organize the pages into subdirectories, and this structure will be used in the output of the site build:

.
├── index.md        => /index.html
└── documentation
    └── doc1.md     => /documentation/doc1/index.html
    └── doc2.md     => /documentation/doc2/index.html

Pretty URLs

By default, all HTML pages (except /404.html) will generate pretty URLs (URLs without the .html extension). This means that, instead of /about-us.html, the URL is /about-us/. This is done by saving all files as index.html and creating all directories as needed.

If you want to disable it, set prettyUrls to false in config file, so you will have something like this:

.
├── index.md        => /index.html
└── documentation
    └── doc1.md     => /documentation/doc1.html
    └── doc2.md     => /documentation/doc2.html

404.html

The page /404.html is a special case and pretty URLs are not applied here. The reason is most servers and static hosting websites like Vercel, Netlify, GitHub Pages and others are configured by default to serve the /404.html page if the requested file doesn't exist. It's almost a standard when serving static sites.

Pretty URLs option would convert the 404 page to /404/index.html, and this conflicts which conflicts with this standard way to serve 404 pages, so this is why it's disabled. Note that you can change this behavior by explicitly setting the url variable in the front matter of the page.

Page date

All pages have a date variable with the file creation date. This value can be used to order the pages (in a blog, for example). If you want to define a different date, you can prepend it to the filename using the yyyy-mm-dd syntax followed by a hyphen - or an underscore _ (or yyyy-mm-dd-hh-ii-ss if you also need the time). Note that this part is removed in generating the final url:

.
├── index.md                          => /index.html
└── posts
    └── 2020-06-21_hello-world.md     => /posts/hello-world/index.html
    └── 2020-06-22_my-second-post.md  => /posts/my-second-post/index.html

Dates can be defined in folders, so it's shared by all pages inside:

.
├── index.md                          => /index.html
└── posts
    └── 2020-06-21_hello-world/
        └── index.md     => /posts/hello-world/index.html
        └── other.md     => /posts/hello-world/other/index.html

Changing the output URL

You might want to have a particular directory structure for your source files that is different from the built site. With the url variable you change the output filename of any page (see Page data)