In one of my recent requirements, I need redirect the people/bot landing on an old/deprecated urls need to redirected to either a new page or to our home page. Usually I do such redirecting from the controller, But recently I came to know that we can even redirect from the router itself.
Simple redirect
match /.*/, to: redirect('/'), via: :all
The above route will match anything and route to homepage. Be cautions to use such routes, and use only in end of your WhatznearWebApp::Application.routes.draw block in router file. The routes on top of draw block have higher precedence and matched first.
Redirect with constraints
If you have some constraints for redirects you can use :constaints key to impose them.
match ":url", to: redirect('/'), via: :all, constraints: { url: /stores-.*/ }
In the above route, the request will be redirected to homepage only if the url starts with stores-. Make sure you don’t use ^(Regexp anchor characters) to specify starts with rails won’t accept that.
Why I am redirecting
If you are thinking of asking me why I am redirecting instead of mapping this to home page, the reasons are
- since the urls are deprecated, I don’t want anyone to bookmark this.
- search engine crawlers should know that this url is redirect and should not index as home page.
Comments and corrections are welcome.
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