Hugo Aliases Workaround with Netlify

Reading the Hugo documentation, aliases are supposed to be very simple and may well be for most people, but I have had trouble making them work, and while trying to resolve the issue I found other people have similar problems.

For me, it might be because of my directory structure, my permalinks setup, my use of slugs that match the directory name - all of which I am happy with and do not want to change.

My permalinks -

permalinks:
  event: '/talk/:slug/'
  tags: '/tag/:slug/'
  categories: '/category/:slug/'
  publication_types: '/publication-type/:slug/'
  post : '/:year/:month/:slug/' # this is different than the default

The front matter of the post -

slug: "indexing-the-works-of-shakespeare-in-elasticsearch-part-4-searching-via-web-api-in-net-5"
title: "Indexing the Works of Shakespeare in Elasticsearch – Part 4, Searching via Web API in .NET 5"

As mentioned above, I don’t want to change the structure of my content directory. My slugs are important because I want the URLs of the posts to match the URLs when I was using WordPress to host my blog. I don’t want to change the titles of my posts to generate URLs that match the desired URLs.

The Problem

When I moved from WordPress to Hugo, I spent a lot of time making sure that the URLs of blog posts remained the same. As with anything like this, it is easy to miss a post or two. By the time someone pointed it out to me, the new URLs had been indexed by Google, but I had LinkedIn and Twitter links to the old URL.

The new (accidental) URL -

/2020/12/indexing-the-works-of-shakespeare-in-elasticsearch-part-4-searching-via-web-api-in-.net-5

What it should have been -

/2020/12/indexing-the-works-of-shakespeare-in-elasticsearch-part-4-searching-via-web-api-in-net-5

I tried aliases locally, and with tests published to Netlify, neither worked for me. I tried multiple ways of writing the alias to no avail.

But there is an easy solution.

Netlify Redirects

In a previous post, I gushed about how good Netlify is. And here is another simple feature that solves this problem.

In my netlifty.toml file I added a redirect from the new (accidental) URL, to the one I wanted -

[[redirects]]
  from = "/2020/12/indexing-the-works-of-shakespeare-in-elasticsearch-part-4-searching-via-web-api-in-.net-5"
  to =   "/2020/12/indexing-the-works-of-shakespeare-in-elasticsearch-part-4-searching-via-web-api-in-net-5"
  status = 301

Problem solved.