Relative links for GitHub pages

You’ve been able to use relative links when authoring Markdown on GitHub.com for a while. Now, those links will continue to work when published via GitHub Pages.

If you have a Markdown file in your repository at docs/page.md, and you want to link from that file to docs/another-page.md, you can do so with the following markup:

[a relative link](another-page.md)

When you view the source file on GitHub.com, the relative link will continue to work, as it has before, but now, when you publish that file using GitHub Pages, the link will be silently translated to docs/another-page.html to match the target page’s published URL.

Under the hood, we’re using the open source Jekyll Relative Links plugin, which is activated by default for all builds.

Relative links on GitHub Pages also take into account custom permalinks (e.g., permalink: /docs/page/) in a file’s YAML front matter, as well as prepend project pages’ base URL as appropriate, ensuring links continue to work in any context.

Happy (consistent) publishing!

Written by

Ben Balter

@benbalter

Ben Balter is Chief of Staff for Security at GitHub, the world’s largest software development platform. Previously, as a Staff Technical Program manager for Enterprise and Compliance, Ben managed GitHub’s on-premises and SaaS enterprise offerings, and as the Senior Product Manager overseeing the platform’s Trust and Safety efforts, Ben shipped more than 500 features in support of community management, privacy, compliance, content moderation, product security, platform health, and open source workflows to ensure the GitHub community and platform remained safe, secure, and welcoming for all software developers. Before joining GitHub’s Product team, Ben served as GitHub’s Government Evangelist, leading the efforts to encourage more than 2,000 government organizations across 75 countries to adopt open source philosophies for code, data, and policy development.