Providing clean urls for static sites since 1776

Note: This project is in early development, and versioning is a little different. Read this for more details.

Let's say that you are using connect to serve a static site. You might have pages like about.html, foobar.html, etc. When using connect's default static router, you'll see the full .html extension at the end of each of these pages. But really, that's not necessary for the user to see or have to type in, it would be better to go to http://example.com/about than http://example.com/about.html. This is exactly what hygienist does -- it removes the file extensions and just uses the filename as the route. How convenient!

npm install hygienist-middleware --save

This library can be used with connect, express, and any other server stack that accepts the same middleware format. A very basic usage example:

var http = require('http');
    connect = require('connect'),
    hygienist = require('hygienist-middleware');

var app = connect()
  .use(hygienist('public'))
  .use(connect.static('public'));

var server = http.createServer(app).listen(1111)

Note that hygienist does not function as a static server on its own, it simply modifies the urls in the request or redirects if necessary. You will still need a static server to be added as middleware after hygienist. In this example, we use serve-static, connect's default static file server. Hygienist does however still need your root path to be passed as an argument. If you aren't a fan of the repetition of passing the root path to multiple middleware, you can find hygienist and several other useful pieces of middleware for serving static sites bundled together in charge.

By default, hygienist will only serve .html files as clean urls. If you would like to change this behavior, you can override via a extensions option, which is a globstar string or array of globstar strings intended to match files you want hygienist to serve as clean urls. For example, if we wanted to serve both html and json files with clean urls:

hygienist('public', { extensions: ['*.html', '*.json'] })

That's it! If you have other ideas or ways you'd like to use hygienist, we'd love to hear them, just open an issue or pull request!

• Details on the license can be found here
• Details on running tests and contributing can be found here