Adding redirects in Gatsby

During the recent migration of this site from Jekyll to Gatsby, I was left with some URLs that had changed.

/code/gamification-concepts-in-software-design

had became:

/gamification-concepts-in-software-design

There are two approaches to adding redirects in Gatsby.

Client-Side redirects using Gatsby Plugins

The first approach is to use the Gatsby plugin system. These typically generate stub pages that do a client-side redirect when the page is served.

Using gatsby-redirect-from Plugin

The gatsby-redirect-from plugin extends the frontmatter of posts to include redirect_from configuration.

To install:

cd yourproject/
npm i gatsby-redirect-from gatsby-plugin-meta-redirect

Then load the plugins in gatsby-config.js:

plugins: [
  'gatsby-redirect-from',
  'gatsby-plugin-meta-redirect' // make sure this is always the last one
]

You can now extend your posts using:

---
title: Aperture File Types
redirect_from:
  - /code/gamification-concepts-in-software-design/
  - /code/another-url/
---

Note: trailing slashes are required

Redirects using Hosting Service

The plugin approach is not ideal for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) as it still resolves the old page with a HTTP Status Code of 200 and then does a clientside redirect.

The preferred option is for the server to send a HTTP Status Code of 301 (Permanently Moved). For sites generated statically you generally have no control over the server as pages are published via a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Fortunately some hosting services provide additional configuration to allow this.

301 Redirects with Netlify

One of my favourite hosting services is Netlify. It is quite mature and is the market leader for hosting of statically generated sites.

To implement 301 redirects, add a _redirect file to the root of your site:

# Redirects from what the browser requests to what we serve
/code/gamification-concepts-in-software-design      /gamification-concepts-in-software-design
/code/another-url                                   /another-url

For Gatsby sites, add it to your static folder so it will be copied at build time.

If you want further granular control (e.g. 404 redirects, authorisation), Netlify also supports a global configuration file. The full documentation can be found here.

About the author

For the past two decades, Scott McCulloch has worked with a variety of distributed computing technologies. He is currently focused on cloud-native applications.