sourcehut pages: redirect (sub)domain

By Danny van Kooten on Feb 12, 2024 on Permalink.

Last weekend I moved this site over to sourcehut pages. Deployment was a lot quicker than through GitHub pages and the SSL certificate was issued within seconds of me pushing the tarball to the sourcehut servers.

One thing that took me a while to figure out was how to set-up a redirect from my apex domain to the www. variant. I'm sharing my approach here in the hope others can find it more easily:

Ideally this would be a HTTP redirect, but this does not seem possible right now so instead we can use HTML and JS. The gist of the idea is as follows:

• Ensure the DNS of both domains is pointing to sourcehut's records.
• Upload two HTML files to the domain we want to redirect from.
• Use <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; redirect-to-domain.com"> to redirect the / homepage.
• Use window.location.href = "redirect-to-domain.com" in a 404 handler to redirect all other pages.

Redirecting the homepage

Create a filed called index.html with the following file contents:

index.html

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=https://www.dannyvankooten.com/">

Redirecting while retaining the request URL

Create a file called 404.html with the following file contents:

404.html

<script>window.location.href = 'https://www.dannyvankooten.com' + window.location.pathname;</script>

Create another file called config.json with the following file contents:

config.json

{
	"notFound": "/404.html"
}

Then, create a tar archive and use hut to publish to the domain you would like to redirect while specifying the file we just created through the --site-config argument:

tar -C . -cvz . > site.tar.gz
hut pages publish --site-config=config.json -d dannyvankooten.com site.tar.gz

That's it. Any URL on dannyvankooten.com will now result in loading the specified 404 page, which in turn will redirect you to www.dannyvankooten.com with the same path.

PS. Note that you still want to ensure your HTML contains a <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/dresses/green-dresses"> tag pointing to the canonical source of each of your pages.

Comments are welcome. You can email me at hi @ this domain.