docs/lib/redirects

Redirects

Docs redirects are complex! Some reasons why:

• Docs URLs have changed many times over the years, whether because docs team members have renamed individual articles or made global changes (e.g., moving all /articles to /github).
• Redirects can be hardcoded in frontmatter or generated via code in this directory (or both!).
• Live docs and archived docs require different redirect handling because they may have differently formatted URLs (e.g., legacy /enterprise/2.17 vs. modern /enterprise-server@2.22).

Read on for more about how redirects work under the hood.

Precompiled redirects

Precompiled redirects account for the majority of the docs site's redirect handling.

When lib/warm-server.js runs on server start, it creates all pages in the site by instantiating the Page class for each content file, then passes the pages to lib/redirects/precompile.js to create redirects. The precompile script runs lib/redirects/permalinks.js, which:

1. Includes all legacy redirects from static/developerjson
2. Loops over each page's frontmatter redirect_from entries and creates an array of legacy paths for each one (using the same handling as for permalinks).
3. Any other exceptions from the static/redirect-exceptions.txt file

The results comprise the page.redirects object, whose keys are always only the path without language. Sometimes it contains the specific plan/version (e.g. /enterprise-server@3.0/v3/integrations to enterprise-server@3.0/developers/apps) and sometimes it's just the plain path (e.g. /articles/viewing-your-repositorys-workflows to /actions/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-workflows)

All of the above are merged into a global redirects object. This object gets added to req.context via middleware/context.js and is made accessible on every request.

In the handle-redirects.js middleware, the language part of the URL is removed, looked up, and if matched to something, redirects with language put back in. Demonstrated with pseudo code:

var fullPath = '/ja/foo'
var newPath = redirects['/foo']
if (newPath) {
  redirect('/ja' + newPath)
}

Archived Enterprise redirects

Archived Enterprise redirects account for a much smaller percentage of redirects on the docs site.

Some background on archival: a snapshot of the HTML files for each deprecated Enterprise Server version is archived in a separate repo and proxied to docs.github.com via middleware/archived-enterprise-versions.js.

Starting with Enterprise Server 2.18, we updated the archival process to start preserving frontmatter and permalink redirects. But these redirects for 2.13 to 2.17 are not recoverable.

As a workaround for these lost redirects, we have two files in lib/redirects/static:

• archived-redirects-from-213-to-217.json

  This file contains keys equal to old routes and values equal to new routes (aka snapshots of permalinks at the time) for versions 2.13 to 2.17. (The old routes were generated via lib/redirects/get-old-paths-from-permalink.js.)

• archived-frontmatter-fallbacks.json

  This file contains an array of arrays, where the child arrays are a group of all frontmatter redirects for each content file. This is essentially list of all the historical paths for the articles in old versions. The problem is, we don't know which historical paths correspond to which versions.

Here's how the middleware/archived-enterprise-versions.js fallback works: if someone tries to access an article that was updated via a now-lost frontmatter redirect (for example, an article at the path /en/enterprise/2.15/user/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile-page), the middleware will first look for a redirect in archived-redirects-from-213-to-217.json. If it does not find one, it will look for a child array in archived-frontmatter-fallbacks.json that contains the requested path. If it finds a relevant array, it will try accessing all the other paths in the array until it finds one that returns a 200. For this example, it would successfully reach /en/enterprise/2.15/user/articles/viewing-contributions-on-your-profile (no -page).

This is admittedly an inefficient brute-force approach. But requests for archived docs <2.18 are getting less and less common as organizations upgrade their Enterprise instances, and all the expensive calculation happens in the middleware on page request, not on server warmup, so at least it's a relatively isolated process.

Tests

Redirect tests are mainly found in tests/routing/*, with some additional tests in tests/rendering/server.js.

The tests/fixtures/* directory includes developer-redirects.json, graphql-redirects.json, and rest-redirects.json.