Reliable links to source files

[dhbradshaw]

I'm trying to add an edit link and icon (next to the print icon and the optional git icon on the top right of each page).

The goal is to have that link point to the source markdown file when possible. So far, I've gotten almost there but not quite using

href="{{git_repository_url}}/tree/master/src/{{path}}".

This seems to work for every page -- except for the front page! In this case, the template path variable resolves to index.md, but there isn't actually an index.md in the source folder so the link gets a 404.

(I looked into special casing this, checking for path == index.md and then fixing it, but unfortunately default handlebars doesn't accept equality checks in if statements.)

Any thoughts on how to embed more reliable source file links?

[ehuss]

There is a PR at #1148 to add this, but ran into the same problem with readme/index translation.

[dhbradshaw]

Nice to see that we're not alone here.

In our case, the repository has been around for awhile and was used with another tool (docsify). When I transitioned to mdbook I tried not to be too invasive. So the directory structure is unusual for mdbook. That means 2 things. 1. Having edit links is valuable to save users from having to figure out where the source code is once they're at the repository, and 2. in our particular case, index.html should point to introduction.md rather than to readme.

It seems like a couple of different paths could make this work.

1. We could either alter {{path}} so that it doesn't mangle the md links (or, if that behavior needs to be kept we could introduce {{non_mangled_path}}), or
2. We could extend handlebars with an extra custom command to enable more powerful logic. For example, if_eq. https://stackoverflow.com/a/15095019.

I like 1 because it takes care of the problem at its root. On the other hand, I like 2 because it makes mdbook templates more powerful / useful down the road.

[ehuss]

I'm not entirely sure if it solves your use case, but I think #1506 solves this as there is now a edit-url-template option for providing a link to the original source. Feel free to clarify if that doesn't cover this.