Post

Generating redirects to old posts in Jekyll

Posted
By Stefan Eletzhofer 1 min read

Problem

Today I looked at my blog analytics and noticed that somehow I still get requests for very old blog posts, but using a different URL format. These return a 404error.

The old blog used octopress1 and apparently used permalinks like blog/year/month/date/title.

Redirect Plugin

So how can we cause Jekyll to recognise these URLs and redirect automatically to the correct post?

Some googling revealed that there’s a Jekyll plugin for that.

Configuration

I just did as the plugin documentation told:

  1. Added gem 'jekyll-redirect-from' to the Gemfile
  2. Rebuilt the bundle bundle

Usage

So for every post I want to have Jekyll redirect to, I need to add list of paths to redirect from in the posts’s YAML front-matter.

For example, this:

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---
layout: post
title: "Jython, Oracle and JDBC"
date: 2012-02-28 08:21
comments: true
tags: jython python howto
redirect_from:
  - /blog/2012/02/28/jython-oracle-jdbc
---

I recently had the need to access a new table in an existing oracle database
...

Redirects form https://seletz.github.io/blog/2012/02/28/jython-oracle-jdbc to whatever URI Jekyll generates for that post. Nice!

  1. octopress is based on Jekyll but it’s more involved and I couldn’t get it back to working, so I reverted to plain Jekyll. ↩

meta jekyll
This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.