My personal site is built with Jekyll and hosted on Netlify. Recently I needed to implement redirects for my posts on installing Python on Mac, Windows, or Chromebook which now live over at installpython3.com.

Per the Netlify docs, there are two methods available: create a _redirects file or a netlify.toml file. The former is simpler and worked just fine in my case where I wanted a 301 redirect, the default, since the move was permanent and SEO would be maintained as much as possible.

There are two steps required: create the _redirects file and then add it to the existing _config.yml file.

Step 1: Create _redirects file

This involved creating a file called _redirects in my project root that contained the URL of a post on this site and then the redirect post it should be sent to separated by whitespace. So for my 3 posts, here's what the file looks like.

install-python3-mac/ https://installpython3.com/mac/
install-python3-windows/ https://installpython3.com/windows/
install-python3-chromebook/ https://installpython3.com/chromebook/

Step 2

This one is easy to miss! The existing _config.yml file used by Jekyll needs to be updated to include _redirects. So at the bottom of _config.yml add the following line:

include: [_redirects]

And that's it! Deploy your site to Netlify per usual and then check that the link redirects properly. There are a number of tools to do this but I found this one worked well.