title: Make a hugo static website site navigate correctly when browsing from the local file system
body: <p>I understand that the normal workflow with hugo is to generate a static site using the &quot;hugo&quot; command, and then <a href="https://gohugo.io/getting-started/usage/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">deploy your site by copying the public/ directory to your production web server.</a> I don't want to do that: I just want the html files in the public/ directory to display correctly, and have links that work, when I open them in my web browser. I do not want to run the &quot;hugo server&quot; command.</p>
  <p>Specifically, the links that are generated are all missing &quot;index.html&quot; at the end.</p>
  <p>For example, a link to the About page will be:
  <code>file:///C:/Users/myusername/Documents/HugoTesting/quickstart/public/about/</code> which will open a view of that directory when I click on it. But it will display the web page properly if I can change the link  to: <code>.../public/about/index.html</code></p>
  <p>How can I make that change throughout my site? I already set &quot;relativeUrl&quot; to true in my config file, as it says to do here:
  <a href="https://gohugo.io/content-management/urls/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://gohugo.io/content-management/urls/</a> as it was necessary to get my index page to display properly. The documentation there says this helps to &quot; make your site browsable from a local file system&quot; so I know it must be possible.</p>
  <p>I've tried <a href="https://gohugo.io/content-management/urls/#permalinks-configuration-example" rel="nofollow noreferrer">using permalinks</a> and <a href="https://gohugo.io/content-management/urls/#set-url-in-front-matter" rel="nofollow noreferrer">using frontmatter</a> to try and add &quot;index.html&quot; to all of my links, but hugo is adding an extra '/' to whatever I specify using permalinks, and while the &quot;url&quot; tag in the frontmatter works, it's not feasible for me to do for every url in every page.</p>