The built-in server for previewing in a web browser works great! Except for one thing… I'm linking to directory names so that URLs look shorter (/about/ instead of /about/index.html), but it's not picking up the default index.html page in the folder like an Apache web server would. When I click on one of these links, I get the error, 'Sorry, we can't find this resource.'
Can the local server be configured so that I can follow these links when previewing the site?
Not sure about "all" protocol for this, but it really isn't good practice to have multiple index.html files in your project (unless you're using them to mask the ability of users to show file trees of directories, images, etc.). To be more productive in your page naming, it should be named for its content which will give you a much better result in Google searches.
Couldn't tell you "why" it doesn't work, but could be that they don't want it to work or a bug. I would post it in the bug forum and see what kind of response is given there?
On my own server I can easily disable directory indexing, so that's not the reason. It's very common for sites to hide the filename extensions, either by this approach or with some URL rewrite rules. I actually went with the folder approach for the exact reason you mention… SEO. Rewriting the extension away so that it doesn't show in the address bar may have the unwanted effect of your page getting indexed twice by search engines, one with ‘.html’ and one without. (I've tested and confirmed this.) This can reportedly dilute your search engine score, or even get you penalised for having duplicate content.
Perhaps there are other methods I haven't thought of? The Bootstrap Studio site is a good example as it turns out… a static site (I think) with URLs like https://bootstrapstudio.io/tutorials/. So how have they accomplished this? There's no page at /tutorials/index.html. ?
(I just heard back from the devs about another bug report I made, so I've asked them about this one as well.)
Thanks for starting this thread! The built-in server doesn't try to behave like apache and doesn't support automatically serving index.html files of subfolders. We can add such support in the future. For now you can export your website to your hard drive and test it with real apache/xampp.
Thanks for the explanation Martin! Great, put me down for one vote in favour of that feature. ?
Out of curiosity, how does your website hide the filename extensions (as in the https://bootstrapstudio.io/tutorials/ example)?