Redirects
Over the lifetime of a site, you may find yourself needing to change its structure. Perhaps you need to move a handful of pages under a new folder, or you need to rename a page, etc.
However, if your site has been live for a while, you may have a ton of internal links to those pages. Worse, the rest of the web (say, Google search results, or blogs and articles) may be full of links to those old locations, so even if you can find and fix up everything on your end, you can't control what others have done.
The web has long supported the concept of redirects to handle this. By advertising what links you've changed publicly, search indices can be updated and even if someone visits your page at the old location, your server can automatically tell your browser where they should have gone instead.
In Kobweb, you can define redirects in your project's .kobweb/conf.yaml file. You simply define a series of from and to values in the server.redirects block.
Kobweb servers will pick up these redirect values from the conf.yaml file and intercept any matching incoming route requests, sending back a 301 status code to the client.
So, in the above example, if a user tries to visit https://example.com/old-page, they will be redirected to https://example.com/new-page automatically. Any internal links on your site that reference the old page will also be handled -- trying to navigate to the old location will automatically end up at the new one.
The Kobweb redirect feature also supports using regexes in the from value, which can then be referenced in the to section using $1, $2, etc. variables which will be substituted with text matches in parentheses.
Group matching can be really useful if you want to redirect a whole section of your site to a new location. For example, the following redirect rule can help if you've moved all pages from an old parent folder into a new one:
The last thing to note is that if you have multiple redirects, they will be processed in order and all applied. This should rarely matter in most cases, but you can use it if you need to combine both changing a folder name AND a page name:
If you are using a third-party static hosting provider to host your site, they will be unaware of the Kobweb conf.yaml file, so you will need to read their documentation to learn how to configure your redirects with them.
In this case, you may be able to skip defining redirects in your own Kobweb configuration file, since it may be redundant at that point. However, it may still be useful to do for documentation purposes and to ensure you won't 404 due to an old, internal link that you forgot to update.