How to co-locate .md and .html files?

[WoJ]

I am experimenting with the markdown capacities of Caddy and have a problem with .md and .html files being served at the same time.

Since I did not want my pages to end with .md (http://example.com/hello.md), I rewrite .html URLs to .md ones:

http://localhost:9998 {
	root /www
	markdown / {
		template default.html
	}
	rewrite / {
		r ^(.*)\.html 
		to {1}.md
	}
}

This is fine, http://example.com/hello.html and http://example.com/hello.md point to the same page as expected.

This setup, however, means that I cannot have standalone .html pages anymore (as they would be rewritten to a non-exiting .md page).

Is there a way to say “rewrite to .md except if the file actually exists, in which case do not do any rewrite” (or rewrite to itself if that helps)?

I have doubts whether my setup is reasonable (rewrite .html pages to .md) and whether having bare URLs (http://example.com/hello) which would be picked up as .md files via the ext directive would not be a wiser approach (it probably would).

Nevertheless, the question on conditional rewrite based on the existence of a file could be useful.

[Whitestrake (Matthew Fay)]

Howdy @WoJ, the rewrite directive actually handles this pretty neatly.

to is a space-separated list of destination paths to rewrite to (the resource to respond with); it will try each destination in sequence until the first one that exists on disk in the site root

—https://caddyserver.com/docs/rewrite

So you can add an arbitrary number of rewrite targets, and Caddy will try each one in turn. For example:

rewrite {
  r ^(.*)\.html$
  to {1}.md {path}
}

If it can’t find the md file, it falls back to {path}, which is basically what it started with anyway.

ALTERNATIVELY:

Use the index directive! (if you’re serving indexes with this, that is).

index sets the list of file names that are used as “index” files. When a directory path is requested instead of a specific file, the directory is checked for existing index files. The first matching file name is served.

—Welcome — Caddy Documentation

For example:

index index.md index.html