Django comes with an optional redirects application. It lets you store simple redirects in a database and handles the redirecting for you.
To install the redirects app, follow these steps:
- Add 'django.contrib.redirects' to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
- Add 'django.contrib.redirects.middleware.RedirectFallbackMiddleware' to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting.
- Run the command manage.py syncdb.
manage.py syncdb creates a django_redirect table in your database. This is a simple lookup table with site_id, old_path and new_path fields.
The RedirectFallbackMiddleware does all of the work. Each time any Django application raises a 404 error, this middleware checks the redirects database for the requested URL as a last resort. Specifically, it checks for a redirect with the given old_path with a site ID that corresponds to the SITE_ID setting.
- If it finds a match, and new_path is not empty, it redirects to new_path.
- If it finds a match, and new_path is empty, it sends a 410 (“Gone”) HTTP header and empty (content-less) response.
- If it doesn’t find a match, the request continues to be processed as usual.
The middleware only gets activated for 404s – not for 500s or responses of any other status code.
Note that the order of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES matters. Generally, you can put RedirectFallbackMiddleware at the end of the list, because it’s a last resort.
For more on middleware, read the middleware docs.
If you’ve activated the automatic Django admin interface, you should see a “Redirects” section on the admin index page. Edit redirects as you edit any other object in the system.
Redirects are represented by a standard Django model, which lives in django/contrib/redirects/models.py. You can access redirect objects via the Django database API.
May 10, 2012