Server-side redirection

Enable server-side redirection (Netlify only)

Hugo supports client-side redirection using aliases. In this approach, the browser receives an instruction to redirect to a new URL when visiting the initial page. We can instruct the server to redirect the URL instead, thus safing an additional roundtrip.

Hinode has defined a template in layouts/index.redir to automatically generate server-side redirection rules for Netlify. When you add the status code 200 to such a rule, the redirection becomes a rewrite. In a rewrite, the URL in the visitor’s address bar remains the same, while the content is fetched from a different location behind the scenes. We will use this mechanism to fetch the content from the branch site.

The below settings creates a file public/_redirects when building the site. It is suggested to add these settings to your production configuration in config/production/hugo.toml. The setting disableAliases disables all client-side redirection rules. Instead, the REDIR output generates all redirection rules for the server, including rewrites.

disableAliases = true

[outputFormats.REDIR]
mediaType = "text/netlify"
baseName = "_redirects"
isPlainText = true
notAlternative = true

[mediaTypes."text/netlify"]
delimiter = ""

[outputs]
home = ["HTML", "RSS", "REDIR"]