redirect usage / example question

[patricksebastien]

let's say that my old forum had this category url:
http://forum.com/forum-2-patch

how to have a redirect on my new forum that points to the right url:
http://forum.com/category/2/patch

i see an option in import.config.json for doing this, but not sure how nodebb is handling this? trying to visit http://forum.com/forum-2-patch doesn't redirect me to http://forum.com/category/2/patch - am I missing a step?

[akhoury]

yea, well, you are.

so here's the thing, NodeBB does not redirect anything for you, you need to handle those old URLs yourself. What you can do (what I did) is use a custom proxy, for old links, I built this server tool for this purpose exactly. (there is a link at the bottom of this comment)

However, first you need to configure the import.config.json correctly, using templates, in order for the importer to provide you with a redirect map (sort of) (see the configs here)

so basically, you provide a template for the old link, and the importer will create the new records and spit out a line for each record in the logs (which you can grep and put in a JSON file your self.)

but in your case you're going to need to save some sort of a "_slug" value in your normalized object.
then you change the template accordingly.

  redirectTemplatesStrings: {
        categories: {
            oldPath: '/forum-<%= _id %>-<%= _slug %>', 
            newPath: '/category/<%= cid %>'
        },

then the importer will spit out this in the logs (look for [redirect])
(it's a new id!)

[redirect] "/forum-2-patch":"/category/3",

You grep them, you clean them up from the [redirect] value, you build a valid JSON file out of them, then you use them as a map here https://github.com/akhoury/RedirectBB

[akhoury]

note for your _slug property will most likely be provided somewhere in your PunBB, just add it in your queries and use it in the importer.

[patricksebastien]

1000x thx!

[akhoury]

also, in my case it was a little easier,

since all my old links where under

example.com/forum*

but my new forum is a subdomain.

forums.example.com

so I had a 2 virtual hosts (using nginx)

main site config, but redirected all the /forum* requests to the RedirectBB process
example.com config: https://github.com/akhoury/RedirectBB/blob/master/nginx.example.com

as for the new forums forums.example.com configs: (which is the usual NodeBB setup)
https://github.com/akhoury/RedirectBB/blob/master/nginx.forums.example.com