apostrophecms / apostrophe-redirects

Allows admins to create redirects within an Apostrophe site
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This module allows admins to add redirects from one URL to another within an Apostrophe site.

This version is for Apostrophe 2.x. For Apostrophe 0.5 use the 0.x series.

Table of Contents

Installation

First make sure you have an Apostrophe project!

Then:

npm install --save apostrophe-redirects

Configuration

In app.js, add the module to your configuration:

// Other modules, then...
'apostrophe-redirects': { }

If you wish, you can change the default status code to 301 (permanent redirect):

// Other modules, then...
'apostrophe-redirects': {
  statusCode: 301
}

Note that permanent redirects are cached by Google for a long time. It is a good idea to encourage users to test with a temporary redirect first, then switch to permanent which is an SEO best practice — as long as it's correct.

That's it!

Usage

While logged in as an admin, click the "Redirects" button. A list of redirects appears, initially empty. Add as many redirects as you like. The "from" URL must begin with a /. The "to" URL may be anything and need not be on your site. The "description" field is for your own convenience.

By default a redirect includes any query string (the ? and whatever follows it, up to but not including any #) on incoming requests when matching for redirection. You can toggle the "ignore query string when matching" option in a redirect definition to ignore query strings on incoming requests and only match on the base URL path. A redirect that does not use this option will always match first, so you can match various specific query strings and then have a fallback rule for other cases.

Be aware that each redirect is live as soon as you save it and that it is possible to make a mess with redirects. In a pinch, you can remove unwanted redirects via the MongoDB command line client (look for { type: "apostrophe-redirect" } in the aposDocs collection in MongoDB).

Also be aware that Apostrophe already creates "soft redirects" every time you change the slug of a page. So you shouldn't need manually created "hard redirects" in that situation.

Advanced configuration with pieces

If you have pieces on your site and you would like to make a safer more persistent redirect that will update if your redirect destination changes, you can use polymorphic joins. To do this you need to add your piece(s) when configuring the module:

'apostrophe-redirects': {
  withType: ['apostrophe-page', 'product']
}

Note: When adding your own pieces, you should always define apostrophe-page to still make it possible to redirect to any normal page. Also note that your piece is written in singular and that you must have a suitable apostrophe-pieces-page for your piece (that is, it must have a ._url property when Apostrophe fetches it). Refer to the core documentation for reusable content with pieces.

Now when you create a new redirect, you have the option to browse for both pages and your pieces in the Apostrophe admin UI.