13th October 2024
I've added support for page-level redirects to Graphite, the default theme that comes bundled with Ark, my static website generator.
This is a useful feature if you need to rename a page or move it to a new location — you can redirect the old page to the new location so old links will continue to work.
To redirect a page, add a redirect field to the node file's YAML header, e.g.
--- redirect: http://example.com/foo-bar/baz.html ---
To redirect a page to an @root/ URL, enclose the URL in double-quotes, e.g.
--- redirect: "@root/foo-bar/baz//" ---
The quotes are needed to stop the YAML parser treating the @ symbol as a "reserved indicator".
Because Ark is a static website generator, it can't support header-level HTTP redirects like 301 Moved Permanently.
Instead, it adds a HTML redirect directive to the page's <head> element:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url='http://example.com/'">
This makes web browsers immediately redirect the user to the new URL.