| title | subtitle | type | categories | tags | date | lastmod | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hugo aliases and redirects |
Using aliases to prevent 404 when restructuring your Hugo site |
blog |
|
|
2020-01-06 |
2020-01-06 |
With the recent redesign and re-structuring of my website I decided to include year and month in URLs. I previously only used the post title as URL key, so a post with title Hello world would be available at kevingimbel.de/hello-world. With the new format this includes the section, year, and month, so for example kevingimbel.de/blog/2020/01/hello-world.
To prevent all old URLs from failing with a 404 I added aliases to all old posts. The documentation on aliases is pretty short and they're a straight-forward, powerful tool to make content available under multiple URL paths. Just add an alias list to the front-matter of the post.
---
title: "My awesome post"
aliases:
- /my-awesome-post/
- /2020-1/
---The above would make the post available at kevingimbel.de/2020-1/, kevingimbel.de/my-awesome-post/, and kevingimbel.de/blog/2020/01/my-awesome-post.
Hugo creates a HTML page for each alias with the following content
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/>
</head>
</html>The line <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url"/> refreshes the page after 0 seconds (immediately) and redirects to the new page at https://example.com/posts/my-intended-url.
With this little bit of extra work all old URLs should work and just redirect to the new pages.