---
title:                                  Jekyll URL Configuration
tagline:                                What is a baseurl
description:                            Jekyll URL Configuration

date:                                   2018-05-01 00:00:00
series:
image:                                  /assets/images/blog/featured/what-is-a-baseurl.jpg

tags:                                   [ Jekyll, Configuration, URL, base_url ]
index:                                  []
categories:                             [ featured ]

#permalink:
regenerate:                             false

resources:                              []
resource_options:
---

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Hey, so there’s been a bit of confusion about what the Jekyll configuration
option called baseurl is. Part of the beauty of open-source and of Jekyll is
that there’s a lot of flexibility. Unfortunately, much of this flexibility
doesn’t apply to `baseurl`. Here’s a quick distillation of its intentions,
and how to use it.

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[[readmore]]
== Mimic GitHub Pages

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See: link:{parker-blog}[Parker Moore, window="_blank"]

The config parameter `baseurl` was originally added back in 2010 to allow
“the user to test the website with the internal webserver under the same
base url it will be deployed to on a production server”.

So let’s say I come up with a cool new project. I want to make documentation
for a project I’m working on called “example”, and I’ll be deploying it to
GitHub Pages as a repo under the *@jekyll* username. Its documentation will
be available at the URL http://jekyll.github.io/example.

In this example, the term *base URL* refers to /example, which I place in
my _config.yml as:

[source, yaml]
----
baseurl: /example
----

When I go to develop my website, I run jekyll serve like normal, but this
time I go to http://localhost:4000/example/. What this baseurl has done is
specified a base path relative to the domain at which the site lives. If you
navigate to just http://localhost:4000/, you will see an error message. If
you have hooked up all your links correctly, then you will never see a URL
in your testing without /example at the beginning of the path.

You might see, for example:

[source, smarty]
----
{{ page.path | prepend:site.baseurl }}
----


== Configuring Your Site Properly

. Set baseurl in your _config.yml to match the production URL without
the host (e.g. /example, not http://jekyll.github.io/example).

. Run jekyll serve and go to `http://localhost:4000/your_baseurl/`, replacing
`your_baseurl` with whatever you set baseurl to in your _config.yml - and not
forgetting the trailing slash.

. Make sure everything works. Feel free to prepend your urls with site.baseurl.
. Push up to your host and see that everything works there, too!

== Now what the heck is site.url?

site.url is used in conjunction with site.baseurl when you want a link to
something with the full URL to it. One common paradigm