Lessons

Set Up Redirects for Github Pages

In this post, I will show you how to setup redirects on Github pages. The objective is to redirect a number of individual pages to unique destinations. For me, I moved my lessons from https://keithweaver.ca/lesson/id to https://posts.keithweaver.ca/lessons/id to be able to use GetDocumentation, but I didn’t want readers not to find the pages.

Before we dive into the details, there are two short comings of this approach. The first is that the page will return a 200 instead of a 301 (Redirect). This means it’s not instructing the system reading to follow the redirect. Second, the jekyll-redirect-from plugin uses http meta-refresh . Using this plugin without taking special precautions on more than 10% of your website's pages, then Google will degrade your SEO ranking.

We will be adding three files today. The first is a Jekyll configuration file. At the root of my site, I added _config.yml. Within it, I define the plugin I want to use.

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gems:
  - jekyll-redirect-from

Then I want to add redirects for each of the pages I want to redirect. The first example will be [a.md](http://a.md) at the root. This will redirect from https://keithweaver.ca/a to https://example.com. The contents of my markdown file are:

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---
permalink: /a
redirect_to: 'http://example.com'
---

I publish those changes to my repository and you can see it in action.

It’s working as expected. It’s now time to setup redirects for sub-directories too. This will be https://keithweaver.ca/test-sub/a redirects to https://example.com#2. I create a sub-directory with test-sub and within it, I add a.md. The contents are:

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---
permalink: /test-sub/a
redirect_to: 'http://example.com#2'
---

Once again, the redirects works perfectly.

Conclusion

That’s it! The solution is not perfect, but gets the job done.

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39657226/jekyll-redirect-link
• https://superdevresources.com/redirects-jekyll-github-pages/
• https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from#redirect-to
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10178304/what-is-the-best-approach-for-redirection-of-old-pages-in-jekyll-and-github-page
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5302663/permanent-redirect-from-github-gh-pages
• https://www.mslinn.com/jekyll/6000-redirects.html