Eleventy: Netlify Redirects

Netlify has a couple of different ways to handle redirects on your site: using a _redirects file or the Netlify configuration file (netlify.toml). I tend to handle explicit path redirects in the former, and pattern-based redirects in the latter.

Explicit Path Redirects #

While updating my reading log I noticed that I had incorrectly titled the first entry for the ongoing Daredevil series: I listed the first volume as Daredevil: Know Fear, Vol. 1. After I read the next collection I realized that the volume number should precede the subtitle—so it should really be Daredevil Vol. 1: Know Fear, to be consistent with the next one, Daredevil Vol. 2: No Devils, Only God¹.

So I updated the title, but now I had a url slug that didn’t match the title. So /reading/daredevil-know-fear-v1/ should be /reading/daredevil-v1-know-fear/. Enter the Netlify _redirects file, which should be deployed to the publish directory of your site. I created one in the root directory of my repository, then plugged in those paths redirects, one per line, and I was almost ready to go:

/reading/daredevil-know-fear-v1/ /reading/daredevil-v1-know-fear/

Eleventy Passthrough Declaration #

I say almost because if you’re using Eleventy, you need to actually specify where that file should end up, because otherwise it won’t get published. In .eleventy.js I added a single line:

eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("_redirects");

This mimics the existing declarations for image and CSS files:

eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("img");
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("css");

Note that you don’t have to put that _redirects file in the root of your repo like I did. Other folks put it elsewhere, like in this example from Sean C. Davis—Sean has the file in a static directory.

Pattern-based Redirects #

What if you have hundreds of redirects, however? Listing them one-by-one in the _redirects file would work, but it would also be painstaking to put all those links in, especially if they follow a pattern. My old WordPress blog used a year/month/day URL pattern, like:

/2020/09/08/eleventy-escaping-nunjucks-statements-in-markdown-code-blocks/

Since my posts in Eleventy all just originate at the posts directory, that URL should now be:

/posts/eleventy-escaping-nunjucks-statements-in-markdown-code-blocks/

In this case it makes much more sense to use the netlify.toml file. I added this declaration:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/:year/:month/:date/:slug"
  to = "/posts/:slug"
  status = 301

See those colons? They act as placeholders for bits of the path (much like RegEx capture groups). Since I only really cared about the slug after the year/month/date² sequence, I could grab that :slug placeholder for the new URL pattern: to = "/posts/:slug".

Local Testing #

Ok, now everything should be redirecting properly. How do you test this locally, without deploying to Netlify a dozen times until you get the configuration right? Turns out Netlify Dev allows you to test custom headers and redirects. I installed that, ran netlify dev, and verified my redirects before committing everything and kicking off a deploy to Netlify.

Netlify Dev even has a handy --live option which creates a public URL for your local development instance (for as long as that session is running). Handy for collaborating with teammates in a code pairing situation.

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1. Do I often get paralyzed about naming conventions for files in a codebase? Why yes, I very much do. ↩︎

2. Now I’m wondering if that should be :day, not :date. ↩︎