Hakyll clean URLs and feeds

I’ve just finished adding Atom and RSS feeds to this website. While Hakyll provides (excellent) built-in support for feeds, the way I’ve set up clean URLs to avoid .html suffixes everywhere (inspired by/ripped off from Rohan Jain) initially didn’t quite work right with it, so I’ll document how I fixed this below.

In the original method, clean URLs are implemented in two parts: first cleanRoute routes foo.md to foo/index.html, and then cleanIndexUrls rewrites internal links to remove all the index.html suffixes; see the post for more details. Up to now, this worked well enough, but when the feeds are generated, index.html is left in the links, and on closer inspection, it’s missing the point somehow. Hakyll URLs are generated via the url field attached to defaultContext, which eventually comes from the following:

urlField :: String -> Context a
urlField key = field key $
    fmap (maybe empty toUrl) . getRoute . itemIdentifier

So we can see that it all comes down to the Route of the item. In the case of cleanRoute, this is going to include the index.html. Rather than including this in the URLs and then stripping them out later with cleanIndexUrls, it seems much cleaner to redefine the url field in the context to something more canonically correct. Thus:

cleanUrlField :: String -> Context a
cleanUrlField key = field key $
  fmap (maybe empty (cleanIndex . toUrl)) .
  getRoute .
  itemIdentifier

myContext :: Context String
myContext =
  cleanUrlField "url" <>
  defaultContext

With this change, we don’t need to run cleanIndexUrls any more, and the feed generator code picks up the correct URL to place in the Atom and RSS feeds. You can see the full site.hs file with these changes here.