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!