Pretty Routes for
Static HTML in Nginx

by Eric Fortis October 28, 2020

HTML pages without the extension look prettier. For instance:

example.com/foo

instead of:

example.com/foo.html

Option A

Upload the HTML files without the extension, and in your nginx.conf, set: default_type 'text/html';

Option B (alias alike)

If you need to serve both routes, /cards and /cards.html, in Nginx set: try_files $uri.html $uri =404;

That attempts to find a file with the “.html” extension appended. The caveat is that it won’t send a 301 (redirect) status code. So for SEO purposes it may hurt having two routes. For that, see how to redirect.