pages-redirects

This app redirects traffic from previous pages.18f.gov sites to their new URLs, which are usually a subdomain of 18f.gov (eg pages.18f.gov/boop → boop.18f.gov).

This app also contains a number of non-pages.18f.gov-related redirects that were previously handled by federalist-redirects. These redirect rules can be found in templates/_federalist-redirects.njk.

Adding a new redirect

pages.18f.gov redirects

To add a new redirect from a retired pages.18f.gov to its new 18f.gov-subdomain home, you will need to edit pages.yml. Please open a Pull Request with your modifications.

If you need to add a simple redirect of pages.18f.gov/site-name to site-name.18f.gov, simply add a new line to the pages.yml that looks like:

- site-name

If you need to change the name of the old page to something new, like pages.18f.gov/old-name to new-name.18f.gov, add lines of the following form to pages.yml:

- from: old-name
  to: new-name

If you need to redirect to a different domain from 18f.gov, like pages.18f.gov/old-name to new-name.new-domain.gov, add lines of the following form to pages.yml:

- from: old-name
  to: new-name
  toDomain: new-domain.gov

Additionally you can redirect to a custom path on that domain, like pages.18f.gov/old-name to new-name.new-domain.gov/custom-path, add lines of the following form to pages.yml:

- from: old-name
  to: new-name
  toDomain: new-domain.gov
  toPath: custom-path

Domain redirects

To create a redirect for yourOrigDomain.gov to yourNewDomain.gov, perform the following steps:

Add a route for yourOrigDomain.gov in manifest-prod.yml.njk

route: yourOrigDomain.gov

Add a redirect configuration in _federalist-redirects.njk:

server {
  listen {{ PORT }};
  set $target_domain yourNewDomain.gov;
  server_name yourOrigDomain.gov;
  return 301 https://$target_domain;
}

Add yourdOldDomain.gov as an external link to docker-compose.yml

app:yourOrigDomain.gov

Test this app as described below in the Testing section
Ask an administrator to create a custom-domain for yourOrigDomain.gov and to provide you the generated CNAME and TXT record

cf create-service cdn-route cdn-route yourOrigDomain.gov -c '{"domain": "yourOrigDomain.gov"}'

Update the DNS settings (CNAME and TXT record) for yourOrigDomain.gov with the details specified by your custom-domain

Once your changes are merged into main by an administrator, the pages-redirects app will be redeployed by CircleCI and your redirects should start working within a few minutes.

Developing

This is a NodeJS-based project that uses yarn for managing node dependencies. After making sure you have it installed, run yarn to install dependencies.

The NodeJS code (called from build.js) reads an array of sites to redirect from the pages.yml file and inserts new NGINX rewrite rules into the nginx.conf.njk template in templates/. The resulting nginx.conf files (one for testing in Docker and one for the production site) are written to the out/ directory. The build script also produces a CloudFoundry manifest file at out/manifest-prod.yml for deploying this app to cloud.gov.

Testing

To run unit tests, run yarn test.

Integration Tests

Local Docker

You can run integration tests locally against a Docker container. First make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed, and maybe give the 18F Docker guide a read.

Then build and run tests in the docker-compose network:

yarn build-docker && yarn test-docker

Real server

To run integration tests against a real server:

TARGET_HOST=<FULL_URL_TOSERVER> yarn test-integration

For example:

TARGET_HOST=https://pages-redirects.app.cloud.gov yarn test-integration

Deploying

This is deployed in GovCloud cloud.gov:

org: gsa-18f-federalist
space: redirects

Automated Deployments

This app is automatically deployed by CircleCI when commits are pushed to the main branch (such as from a merged Pull Request). Deployments are done with the cf-autopilot plugin so that there will be no downtime.

See circle.yml and deploy-ci.sh for details.

Manual Deployments

To manually deploy (this should not be necessary):

yarn build
cf push -f out/manifest-prod.yml`

jmdembe/pages-redirects