Pretzel Plugin: Redirect
A while back I wrote about the migration of my blog from Community Server over Jekyll to Pretzel.
One golden rule when restructuring a web site is to avoid dead links. The original web engine was
a classic ASP.NET application, where every URL ends in .aspx (at least if you don’t configure
extensionless URLs). Tens years ago every URLs ended in an extension like .html, .php, whatever.
Now-a-days, you barely see any file extensions anymore. The web servers don’t expose the underlying
technology, and the user just doesn’t care. And so does Pretzel.
To use a new URL schema, but preserve the old links and redirect them to the new schema, I wrote an plugin for Pretzel, Pretzel.RedirectFrom. I’ve used the jekyll-redirect-from plugin as a guide, so the syntax is the same. Just add alternative URLs in the page’s YAML front-matter:
---
title: "My First Post"
redirect_from:
- /pages/page1
---
This will generate a small html page at \pages\page1\index.html, which will redirect to the new
location:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<title>Redirecting...</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="/2016/10/31/myfirstpost.html" />
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/2016/10/31/myfirstpost.html" />
<h1>Redirecting...</h1>
<a href="/2016/10/31/myfirstpost.html">Click here if you are not redirected.</a>
<script>
location="/2016/10/31/myfirstpost.html"
</script>
Pretzel is a static file generator, so the redirection must be performed at the client-side.
However, I prefer a “real” redirect, i.e. a response with the correct HTTP status 301 Moved Permanently.
Therefore I’ve implemented an additional switch. If you’re using IIS (or Azure, or any other web server
supporting ASP.NET), you can specify the switch redirect_generate_aspx: true in Pretzel’s
_config.yml. In this case the generated page will look like this:
<%@ Page Language="C#"%>
<script runat="server">
private void Page_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
Response.StatusCode = 301;
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","/2016/10/31/myfirstpost.html");
Response.End();
}
</script>
This ensures that the server returns the correct HTTP status.
Anyway, this plugin is a simple ScriptCs file,
so you only have to copy
Pretzel.RedirectFrom.csx
to the _plugin folder of your Pretzel site, and you will be ready to use redirects.
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