Automatically update _redirects file #522

zmitchell · 2023-04-14T15:36:00Z

Manually keeping track of redirects is bound to fail when someone forgets. We should use automatic tooling to help us with this. There are tools like sphinxcontrib.redirects to help with this.

It doesn't sound like this package adds an HTTP status code at the end, but the fact that a changed _redirects file shows up in git status is enough to remind you that you may want to add one if the default 302 isn't sufficient.

The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered:

zmitchell · 2023-04-15T01:19:22Z

So I misread what this Sphinx module does, it tracks which files have redirect to one another, but not which URLs redirect to one another.

These are the Sphinx-specific redirect modules I found:

sphinx-reredirects, docs
- Detects a change from foo.md to foo2.md, generating both foo.html and foo2.html with a <meta http-refresh="..."> tag in foo.html to redirect to foo2.html.
- Pros
  - Is host-agnostic i.e. doesn't rely on Cloudflare Pages specific _redirects file
- Cons
  - Could lead to significant bloat over time with many empty pages simply existing to serve redirects
sphincontrib.redirects ❌
- Very simple, puts file redirects into a configurable file path
- Records foo.md -> foo2.md, including the file extensions
- Last update was 10 months ago
- Pros
  - Works similar to what we already have
- Cons
  - Only works with the Sphinx singlehtml builder, which we can build with (it's in the Makefile), but is unsuitable for the whole site
  - We would have to do post-processing on the redirects file to format it how Cloudflare Pages wants
    - Wouldn't be terribly complicated e.g. sed -i 's/.md//g _redirects
sphinx-rediraffe
- A mix of the above two, generates the redirecting pages and can automatically manage a redirects file
- Lots of features, probably more than we want or need
- Does a graph traversal of redirects to make sure that chained redirects are resolved to a single redirect
- Pros
  - Lots of features and configuration options
  - Is host-agnostic
- Cons
  - Lots of features and configuration options
  - Could lead to significant bloat over time with many empty pages simply existing to serve redirects
  - We would have to do post-processing on the redirects file to format it how Cloudflare Pages wants
    - Wouldn't be terribly complicated e.g. sed -i 's/.md//g _redirects

Considering the options I think sphinx-rediraffe is probably the way to go given how configurable it is. Unfortunately none of these three modules are in nixpkgs. I would be willing to add them to nixpkgs if someone wants to guide me through that process. Maintenance would be minimal as none of these packages see frequent updates.

fricklerhandwerk · 2023-04-18T18:02:23Z

Thanks for doing the research!

We could do a mob session for adding a package, and try to follow official documentation in order to see how well it works.

nixos-discourse · 2023-04-24T15:11:44Z