JekyllRedirectFrom

Give your Jekyll posts and pages multiple URLs.

When importing your posts and pages from, say, Tumblr, it's annoying and impractical to create new pages in the proper subdirectories so they, e.g. /post/123456789/my-slug-that-is-often-incompl, redirect to the new post URL.

Instead of dealing with maintaining those pages for redirection, let jekyll-redirect-from handle it for you.

How it Works

Redirects are performed by serving an HTML file with an HTTP-REFRESH meta tag which points to your destination. No .htaccess file, nginx conf, xml file, or anything else will be generated. It simply creates HTML files.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'jekyll-redirect-from'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install jekyll-redirect-from

Once it's installed into your evironment, add it to your _config.yml:

plugins:
  - jekyll-redirect-from

💡 If you are using a Jekyll version less than 3.5.0, use the gems key instead of plugins.

If you're using Jekyll in safe mode to mimic GitHub Pages, make sure to add jekyll-redirect-from to your whitelist:

whitelist:
  - jekyll-redirect-from

Then run jekyll <cmd> --safe like normal.

Usage

The object of this gem is to allow an author to specify multiple URLs for a page, such that the alternative URLs redirect to the new Jekyll URL.

To use it, simply add the array to the YAML front-matter of your page or post:

title: My amazing post
redirect_from:
  - /post/123456789/
  - /post/123456789/my-amazing-post/

Redirects including a trailing slash will generate a corresponding subdirectory containing an index.html, while redirects without a trailing slash will generate a corresponding filename without an extension, and without a subdirectory.

For example...

redirect_from:
  - /post/123456789/my-amazing-post

...will generate the following page in the destination:

/post/123456789/my-amazing-post

While...

redirect_from:
  - /post/123456789/my-amazing-post/

...will generate the following page in the destination:

/post/123456789/my-amazing-post/index.html

These pages will contain an HTTP-REFRESH meta tag which redirect to your URL.

You can also specify just one url like this:

title: My other awesome post
redirect_from: /post/123456798/

Prefix

If site.url is set, its value, together with site.baseurl, is used as a prefix for the redirect url automatically. This is useful for scenarios where a site isn't available from the domain root, so the redirects point to the correct path. If site.url is not set, only site.baseurl is used, if set.

Note: If you are hosting your Jekyll site on GitHub Pages, and site.url is not set, the prefix is set to the pages domain name i.e. http://example.github.io/project or a custom CNAME.

Redirect To

Sometimes, you may want to redirect a site page to a totally different website. This plugin also supports that with the redirect_to key:

title: My amazing post
redirect_to: http://www.github.com

Note: Using redirect_to or redirect_from with collections will only work with files which are output to HTML, such as .md, .textile, .html etc.

Customizing the redirect template

If you want to customize the redirect template, you can. Simply create a layout in your site's _layouts directory called redirect.html.

Your layout will get the following variables:

page.redirect.from - the relative path to the redirect page
page.redirect.to - the absolute URL (where available) to the target page

Configuration

You can configure this plugin in _config.yml by adding to the redirect_from key.

Disabling `redirects.json`

By default, a file called redirects.json, which can be used for automated testing or to implement server-side redirects, will be included in the output. To exclude it from the output, set the json key to false:

redirect_from:
  json: false

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request