Jekyll Relative Links

A Jekyll plugin to convert relative links to Markdown files to their rendered equivalents.

Let's say you have a link like this in a Markdown file:

[foo](bar.md)

While that would render as a valid link on GitHub.com, it would not be a valid link on Pages. Instead, this plugin converts that link to:

[foo](bar.html)

It even work with pages with custom permalinks. If you have bar.md with the following:

---
permalink: /bar/
---

# bar

Then [foo](bar.md) will render as [foo](/bar/).

The default Jekyll's configuration permalink: pretty in the _config.yaml file removes the .html extensions from the generated links.

Because Markdown files rendered by GitHub Pages should behave similar to Markdown files rendered on GitHub.com

1. Add the following to your site's Gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-relative-links'

2. Add the following to your site's config file:

plugins:
  - jekyll-relative-links

Note: If you are using a Jekyll version less than 3.5.0, use the gems key instead of plugins.

You can configure this plugin in _config.yml under the relative_links key. This is optional and defaults to:

relative_links:
  enabled:     true
  collections: false

To exclude specific directories and/or files:

relative_links:
  exclude:
    - directory
    - file.md

Setting the collections option to true enables relative links from collection items (including posts).

Assuming this structure

├── _my_collection
│   ├── some_doc.md
│   └── some_subdir
│       └── another_doc.md
├── _config.yml
└── index.md

the following will work:

In addition to automatically converting relative links in your Markdown files, this plugin also provides a Liquid filter called rellinks that can be used to convert relative links in content that has already been processed by Jekyll's markdownify filter.

This is especially useful when you have Markdown content in your front matter that you want to display with properly converted links.

For example, if you have a page with a sidebar defined in the front matter:

---
title: My Page
sidebar: |
  My page's sidebar **content**.
  
  Might have [a link somewhere](./other.md)
---

You can use the rellinks filter in your template like this:

<aside class="sidebar">
  {{ page.sidebar | markdownify | rellinks }}
</aside>

The rellinks filter will transform any relative links to Markdown files in the HTML output from the markdownify filter, converting them to their rendered equivalents.

Even if the plugin is enabled (e.g., via the :jekyll_plugins group in your Gemfile) you can disable it by setting the enabled key to false.

This plugin does not process links that contain hard line breaks (newlines) within the link syntax. According to the CommonMark specification (section 6.3) and GitHub Flavored Markdown, newlines are not permitted within link text or URLs.

For example, this is not valid Markdown:

[my link
text](page.md)

Nor is this:

[my link](page
.md)

If you need to manage long links while keeping your Markdown source lines at a reasonable length, use reference-style links:

Check out the [comprehensive guide to Jekyll plugins][plugin-guide]
for more information.

[plugin-guide]: path/to/very-long-documentation-filename.md

This approach:

• Keeps your prose readable with appropriate line wrapping
• Works with this plugin (reference links are fully supported)
• Is valid Markdown that works across all parsers
• Separates link definitions from the text, making them easier to maintain