Jekyll::ServerRedirects

This was written because I wanted to migrate my blog from Drupal to Jekyll and I wanted to keep the old URLs.

Most people who use Jekyll seem to prefer to generate HTML pages with a meta refresh tag in them to redirect the browser. I wanted to do it via the server, so I could have proper 301 redirects and not have to keep a few hundred unwanted files lying around.

There is a Jekyll plugin, Jekyll::NginxConfig that is supposed to do this but for some reason it wasn't working. I also tried other plugins like Jekyll Pageless Redirects, Alias Generator for Posts and JekyllRedirectFrom, which seemed like the most promising one, but I could get none of them working.

This was driving me insane, so I grabbed Jekyll::NginxConfig and changed it to do what I wanted. While I was at it, I figured I could add the ability to generate redirects for Apache and not just nginx.

Installation

Add this to your Gemfile:

group :jekyll_plugins do
  gem 'jekyll-server-redirects'
end

You have to specify it under the :jekyll_plugins group otherwise Jekyll won't recognize the server_redirects command.

Then run bundle install.

If using a global Jekyll installation, just do gem install jekyll-server-redirects

Basic usage

On each post you want to redirect to from another URL, add the following to the front matter:

:redirect_from:
  - blog/old-url
  - node/641

This block lists the URLs you want to redirect to your new URL from.

After having all the posts configured, run the following command to generate the server configuration:

bundle exec jekyll server_redirects --server_type nginx

If you didn't install the plugin with Bundler, drop the bundle exec part of the command.

If you want to use Apache instead of nginx, just replace nginx with apache in the command.

This will output the list of redirects for your server of choice. If you want to store it directly in a file, you can append > redirects.conf to the command.

Custom redirects

If you want some custom redirects, you can do so easily by adding a few lines to your Jekyll config file (typically _config.yml):

custom_redirects:
  - from: ^/old-url$
    to: /blog/new-url
    type: permanent

  - from: ^/another-old-url$
    to: /under-construction
    type: temp

Items under custom_redirects are simply translated straight into server directives. In this case and assuming nginx:

rewrite ^/old-url$ /blog/new-url permanent;
rewrite ^/another-old-url$ /under-construction temp;

To know more, see documentation about Nginx's rewrite directives

Custom server directives template

You can also specify your own Liquid template file to use if you wish to have complete control on the resulting server redirection directives. Use --config_template <PATH TO LIQUID TEMPLATE>.