How to make github pages url case insensitive?

Question

Website works for
jerrygoyal.github.io/Flash-Clipboard

but not for (404 error):
jerrygoyal.github.io/flash-clipboard
jerrygoyal.github.io/FLASH-clipboard
jerrygoyal.github.io/flaSH-CLIPboard and so on
You get the idea! How can I make the url case-insensitive?

I've never worked on Jekyll and not sure if my project pages are using jekyll or not. I only created an index.html page and put inside the docs folder of the repository.

I'm using a custom domain (www.jerryfactory.com) to map jerrygoyal.github.io

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Here's the URL to my Github Organisation site : https://github.com/JerryGoyal/jerrygoyal.github.io

And URL for my Github project site: https://github.com/JerryGoyal/Flash-Clipboard/tree/master/docs

I'm thinking of moving my project site content to my Github Organisation site if it's possible. So if the URL case insensitivity works for only Organisation site it's fine.

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Ref: Org and Project Site in Github

Froehlich

Check this: #25816454 – Signorino

You could setup redirects for the case sensitivity that you want redirected to the main URL to mimic the behavior you want. – Joshua

Answer 1

There is no direct way to make github page URLs case-sensitive. But, you can use following hack:-

Redirect from 404 page with mixed-case or upper-case URL to lower case URL. Steps to achieve this:-

• Just go to your root repo (your_username.github.io).
• If not already exist then create a 404.html file and add the following script in it.

<script>
    window.onload = () => {
        currentURL = window.location.href;
        lowerCaseURL = currentURL.toLowerCase();
        if (currentURL != lowerCaseURL) {
            location.replace(lowerCaseURL);
        }
    };
</script>

Note:- Make sure your pages/repo name are always in lower-case.

Logic explained with example:-

If your URL is:-

anmol53.github.io/bmi-tracker

and someone tried following URL:-

anmol53.github.io/BMI-Tracker

By default he/she will get 404. Now we will redirect him/her to anmol53.github.io/bmi-tracker by changing case of current URL by using above script.

Samirasamisen

ngl that's a sweet hack – Froehlich

Answer 2

How can I make the url case-insensitive?

The short answer is: You cannot / It's not possible in GitHub Pages as of this writing.

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The long answer is: Having URLs case-sensitive is a web standard and most webservers will respect that. This has nothing to do with Jekyll or any other similar tool. It's a responsibility of the webserver that is serving the HTML pages that were generated by Jekyll, and in the case of GitHub Pages, they use a *nix-based webserver that is compliant with case-sensitive URLs when locating resources.

A common way to solve this problem is to make sure your pages in Jekyll are always lower-case, which in turn will generate lower-cased URLs.

This shouldn't really be a problem, unless your users are typing the URLs by themselves... And in that case, if you want to be proactive, you can use the jekyll-redirect-from plugin and create redirect entries of the most common ways you believe users will try to access each page.

For example, having the main URL as

• augustoproiete.github.io/flash-clipboard

and redirect the ones below to the main one above via jekyll-redirect-from

• augustoproiete.github.io/Flash-Clipboard
• augustoproiete.github.io/FLASH-CLIPBOARD

Planoconvex

as i've mentioned in the question that i've no knowledge about the jekyll. would you mind telling how to do this change? – Froehlich

@JerryGoyal All the instructions on how to configure it are in the README of the jekyll-redirect-from plugin - github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from – Planoconvex

that README has some installation steps which I don't understand so i followed the steps given in help.github.com/articles/redirects-on-github-pages and it didn't work. – Froehlich

Are you sure that redirect-form would work for custom static pages? – Froehlich

Yep... It works for pages, posts, collection items, etc. If you put a reproducible example on GitHub, I might be able to more easily point out what's missing. BTW, here is an example of a Jekyll site that uses the jekyll-redirect-from plugin and works fine: github.com/netponto/netponto.github.io – Planoconvex

this is my organization site for mail URL: github.com/JerryGoyal/jerrygoyal.github.io and this is my project site for URL/Flash-Clipboard github.com/JerryGoyal/Flash-Clipboard/tree/master/docs – Froehlich

The redirect plugin will not be able to redirect differently cased URLs, because it faces the same constraint of Github not differentiating between case. – Bastard

Answer 3

You can’t make it case-sensitive. Sorry. Case-sensitive URLs are a web-standard. It would be cool if URLs were case-insensitive, but that isn’t true.

Verne