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**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [February 24, 2009, 12:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220 "2009-02-24T12:17:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1
**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 12:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/1 "2009-02-24T12:17:07Z")
Hi all,
i would like to add the .html extension by default to all my
resources. What is the best way to do that? The reason for this is
that i need to download the generated sites via wget and i need
the .html extension for the downloaded files. Also it would be nice if
the link\_to would automatically generate the links with .html…
Thanks,
Gerold
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**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 12:29pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/2 "2009-02-24T12:29:26Z")
how about a before/after\_save callback? i guess that would work.
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**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/3 "2009-02-24T13:00:01Z")
Maybe i was a little too unspecific with my description. Let me try
again:
The website has multiple nested pages and i can address them with
e.g. /pages/first /pages/first/subpage
Now when i want to wget all of the pages the downloaded files are
called first and subpage but
i’d like them to be called first.html and subpage.html so i figured
the easiest way to do that is to just add
.html at the end of all pages by default.
So when i add a resource to routes.rb like
resources :pages
i can call /pages/1 and i get the first page but again if i download
it the file would be called 1 instead of 1.html…
Also if i use link\_to or url\_for i get the links generated without
the .html at the end…
i tried
resources :pages, :format =\> :html
but i think the problem here is that html is the default mimetype and
so it’s ignored. One sollution could be to set
another mimetype as default so i would have to add the html format for
every link i generate which would be ok for me…
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**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/4 "2009-02-24T13:31:17Z")
sounds a little bit silly, bit i just tried a route like
map.connect ‘:controller/:action.html’
that is actually working for me
[http://localhost:3000/bla/index.html](http://localhost:3000/bla/index.html)
---
**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/5 "2009-02-24T13:49:31Z")
> i would like to add the .html extension by default to all my
> resources. What is the best way to do that? The reason for this is
> that i need to download the generated sites via wget and i need
> the .html extension for the downloaded files. Also it would be nice if
> the link\_to would automatically generate the links with .html…
That’s a very bad idea. The better idea might be to add -E option to
your
wget call (and maybe -k too).
## Regards, Rimantas
[http://rimantas.com/](http://rimantas.com/)
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**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 1:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/6 "2009-02-24T13:40:06Z")
i also figured that but i would really like to use resources…
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**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 2:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/7 "2009-02-24T14:12:30Z")
why is it a “very bad” idea? i don’t think that would be harmfull in
any way. But if i can’t find an easy way to do it i will have to fix
it with wget…
---
**Author:**  [@gerold](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/gerold)\
**Post date:** [February 24, 2009, 3:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/add-html-extension-by-default/161220/8 "2009-02-24T15:15:05Z")
> why is it a “very bad” idea? i don’t think that would be harmfull in
> any way. But if i can’t find an easy way to do it i will have to fix
> it with wget…
Well, sorry, but hacking application to get the result for the
_external_ application (the same result you can get by adding two
characters to the command line)
does not sound like a good idea to me.
There are other reasons why file extensions are bad on the
web in general and in REST case in particular, but I won’t go into
that now.
## Regards, Rimantas
[http://rimantas.com/](http://rimantas.com/)