Hugo Redirect

A theme component to enable easy redirection in Hugo sites.

About

Hugo Redirect enables easy redirection: one of the major pieces missing from Hugo's impressive feature set.

Let's say you

• Have an Ugly URLs like yoursite.com/cv.pdf and you'd much rather point people to yoursite.com/cv
• Wrote an awesome post on yoursite.com/blog/2019/09/08/how_to_add_clis and you'd like to share it to people quickly at yoursite.com/cli

Redirection comes in very handy in these cases.

Hugo Redirect currently supports static meta refresh based redirects, _redirect generation for Netlify and and .htaccess (for Apache / Nginx servers) generation.

This is not a standalone theme. It is a Hugo theme component (sort of like a plugin) providing easy URL redirect capabilities to Hugo sites. A working demo of this redirection is available on my site at https://prag.io/cv.

Contributions welcome! Send your pull request.

Usage

In the root of your site repository:

1. Add hugo-redirect as a submodule to be able to get upstream changes later

   $ git submodule add https://github.com/gcc42/hugo-redirect.git themes/hugo-redirect
   

2. Add hugo-redirect as the left-most element of the theme list variable in your site's or theme's configuration file config.yaml or config.toml. Example, with config.yaml:

   theme: ["hugo-redirect", "other-components", "my-theme"]
   

   or, with config.toml,

   theme = ["hugo-redirect", "other-components", "my-theme"]
   

3. To add a new redirect rule, simply run (It's not recommended to create them manually):

   $ hugo new redirect/cv.md # Replace cv with a (arbitrary) redirect name
   

   Open the newly created file redirect/cv.md in your editor and update the url and redirect_to fields in the front matter, like so:

   type = "redirect"
   url = "/cv"
   redirect_to = "/cv.pdf"
   redirect_enabled = true
   

4. If you're hosting on Netlify or Apache/Nginx/<Service that supports .htaccess>, follow the steps below to enable _redirects file generation (recommended)

Hosting on Netlify

If you're using Netlify, you'll want to generate the native _redirects file:

1. Copy _redirects.md to your content folder:

   $ cp themes/hugo-redirect/content/_redirects.md content/
   

2. Edit the file in your text editor and update the value of draft from true to false

Hosting on Apache / Nginx

Check if your hosting supports the .htaccess file configuration. If they do, enable it as:

1. Copy _htaccess.md to your content folder:

   $ cp themes/hugo-redirect/content/_htaccess.md content/
   

2. Edit the file in your text editor and update the value of draft from true to false

That's it. You're done. Now simply build and deploy your site and any requests to yoursite.com/cv should be redirected to yoursite/cv.pdf.

Things to note

1. I'd recommend enabling the appropriate _redirects/.htaccess based on where you're hosting. (Even though meta redirects work fine, this will potentially improve the speed and help with SEO)
2. Avoid mixing hugo-redirect with manual redirection, or you could end up creating a nasty redirect loop
3. Make sure you enter the url and redirect_to parameters exactly as you want them. This means that if you want /cv --> /cv.pdf, make sure you set url = /cv and NOT url = /cv/ (however because of the way Hugo works currently, both /cv --> /cv.pdf and /cv/ --> /cv.pdf will be set up)

Questions?

Create an issue or email me at pranjal at prag.io.

Copyright © 2012 onwards, Pranjal Agrawal [email protected].