Allow to specify redirects in _pkgdown.yml

[lorenzwalthert]

Assuming I have a vignette that I rename, the pkgdown link to this vignette will change and all people who follow the old link will see a 404 error. The same with help files for renamed functions etc. It would be nice if {pkgdown} could provide a way to specify redirects manually, relative to the base url, e.g. in _pkgdown.yml:

redirects:
  articles/new-vignette-name.html:
  - articles/old-vignette-name.html
  - articles/another-old-vignette-name.html

Looks like this is valid yml. The key should be the new name, because it's potentially a one-to-many mapping. What do you think of such a feature?

[hadley]

Yeah, I like it — we'd have to do html style redirects, but that would be better than nothing.

[jayhesselberth]

You can make a custom 404.md file to catch 404 errors so that users get sent somewhere useful.

pkgdown has a generic one: https://pkgdown.r-lib.org/dev/outdated-vignette-name.html

[lorenzwalthert]

According to StackOverflow, "Use of meta refresh is discouraged by the World Wide Web Consortium", which seems to be used by the html style redirects, so I think it's better to look for another solution?

[hadley]

There is no other solution; an html style redirect is the best we can hope for in pkgdown, given that the most common form of deployment is github pages which doesn't support redirects at the http level.

[Bisaloo]

Another option would be for pkgdown to create a page that mirrors the content of the new vignette URL but on the old URL, possibly with a deprecation warning:

It looks like you found this page by following a deprecated link. Please save the new link to this vignette: new link.

But this would possibly add a lot of complexity to an already complex package.