Question

Subpages of Jekyll-powered static site give 404 on app platform?

I deployed a static Jekyll site on DO App Platform. The site has a number of pages and subpages like /product, /product/product1, /product/product2 etc.

The problem: while the /product page and other top-level pages render great, /product/product1 returns 404 on DigitalOcean app platform, while it works great in local testing.

The permalink is specified like this in product/product1.md YAML front matter:

permalink: "/product/product1"

I should also note that I didn’t use the DO example project to set up the Jekyll project. DO autogenerated everything when I just pointed it to my Jekyll project branch on Github. Everything else seems to work great, just having a problem with some specific subpages.

Is there anything I need to change in my project to get the subpages to render correctly and not return 404?

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Kamal Nasser
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
• January 4, 2021
Accepted Answer

👋🏼 @JaanusK

When running bundle exec jekyll build, is /product/product1 generated as product/product1.html?

If that is the case, what’s happening is that when App Platform gets a request for /product/product1, it looks for either a file named exactly product/product1 or product/product1/index.html—none of which exist.

Mapping /product/product1 to /product/product1.html is something that we’re considering however it is not supported yet.

One solution could be to rename the subpages from product/product1.md to product/product1/index.md. This will generate files like /product/product1/index.html which will work with App Platform. Or, you could run a bash script after jekyll build that goes around and relocates subpages to index.html files under subdirectories.

The other option is to deploy the site as a Service instead of a Static Site. I realize this isn’t very ideal but the built-in Jekyll webserver should be able to handle the permalinks properly without making any changes to the source.

JaanusK • January 4, 2021

Thank you. Your answer put me on the right track, and I got it fixed. You are right, that /product/product1 was generated as /product/product1.html in the site output. The fix for me was to update the permalinks in the metadata of each page so that instead of permalink: "/product/product1", I would have permalink: "/product/product1/" (one slash added). This made them generated as /product/product1/index.html, so that /product/product1 link (with or without the slash) also works now.

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