#1279 - [BUG] RKE1 vSphere external (out-of-tree) cloud provider description, has a docs link which leads to 404 Not Found

[martyav]

Fixes #1279

Reminders

• See the README for more details on how to work with the Rancher docs.

• Verify if changes pertain to other versions of Rancher. If they do, finalize the edits on one version of the page, then apply the edits to the other versions.

• If the pull request is dependent on an upcoming release, remember to add a "MERGE ON RELEASE" label and set the proper milestone.

Description

A link in the Rancher UI points to https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.8/en/cluster-provisioning/rke-clusters/cloud-providers/vsphere/out-of-tree, which returns a 404. The correct path is https://ranchermanager.docs.rancher.com/how-to-guides/new-user-guides/kubernetes-clusters-in-rancher-setup/set-up-cloud-providers/configure-out-of-tree-vsphere. Only v2.8 is reported as affected.

I added a redirect, patterned after the redirects on lines 2398 to 2406 in the Docusuarus config file. Since all those redirects also point to files in the now-removed path /v2.8/cluster-provisioning/rke-clusters, I wonder if this broken redirect is related to the same issue (dashboard#9970)?

Comments

[btat]

This doesn't fix #1279. The URL of the problematic link is https://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.8/en/cluster-provisioning/rke-clusters/cloud-providers/vsphere/out-of-tree (different domain) so the request never reaches our Docusaurus site for it to redirect.

This needs to be fixed on https://github.com/rancher/docs/, but I haven't made the fix there yet because of an ongoing caching issue that's blocking updates from going live.

General feedback on redirects:

• The from and to URLs should be for the same versions. Currently / and /v2.8 are the same, but eventually / will mirror a newer version and the redirect will be incorrect.
• There's an existing entry for the to URL already. In this case, an array can be used for the from field instead of creating another entry.