Move to 'jekyll-redirect-from'

Problems with jekyll_alias_generator

I wrote “How to Add Redirects to Post URL on Octopress” few month ago. Now Octopress is compatible with Jekyll 2.0, and some plugins don’t seem to work. Current Octopress uses Jekyll 2.0.3 and when I run rake generate, I see an error:

/path/to/jekyll/lib/jekyll/static_file.rb:40:in `stat': Not a directory @ rb_file_s_stat - /path/to/generated/alias/index.html/ (Errno::ENOTDIR)

So I make this commit:

diff --git a/_plugins/alias_generator.rb b/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
index 1d24cd8..50e9404 100644
--- a/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
+++ b/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
@@ -70,9 +70,10 @@ module Jekyll
           file.write(alias_template(destination_path))
         end
 
-        (alias_index_path.split('/').size + 1).times do |sections|
+        alias_index_path.split('/').size.times do |sections|
           @site.static_files << Jekyll::AliasFile.new(@site, @site.dest, alias_index_path.split('/')[0, sections].join('/'), '')
         end
+        @site.static_files << Jekyll::AliasFile.new(@site, @site.dest, alias_dir, alias_file)
       end
     end
 

But it seems that there is another problem with latest Jekyll, so I make another commit:

diff --git a/_plugins/alias_generator.rb b/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
index 50e9404..76102db 100644
--- a/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
+++ b/_plugins/alias_generator.rb
@@ -56,13 +56,13 @@ module Jekyll
       alias_paths.compact!
 
       alias_paths.flatten.each do |alias_path|
-        alias_path = alias_path.to_s
+        alias_path = File.join('/', alias_path.to_s)
 
         alias_dir  = File.extname(alias_path).empty? ? alias_path : File.dirname(alias_path)
         alias_file = File.extname(alias_path).empty? ? "index.html" : File.basename(alias_path)
 
-        fs_path_to_dir   = File.join(@site.dest, alias_dir)
-        alias_index_path = File.join(alias_dir, alias_file)
+        fs_path_to_dir = File.join(@site.dest, alias_dir)
+        alias_sections = alias_dir.split('/')[1..-1]
 
         FileUtils.mkdir_p(fs_path_to_dir)
 
@@ -70,8 +70,8 @@ module Jekyll
           file.write(alias_template(destination_path))
         end
 
-        alias_index_path.split('/').size.times do |sections|
-          @site.static_files << Jekyll::AliasFile.new(@site, @site.dest, alias_index_path.split('/')[0, sections].join('/'), '')
+        alias_sections.size.times do |sections|
+          @site.static_files << Jekyll::AliasFile.new(@site, @site.dest, alias_sections[0, sections + 1].join('/'), '')
         end
         @site.static_files << Jekyll::AliasFile.new(@site, @site.dest, alias_dir, alias_file)
       end

To say the result first, I had no luck. The alias directories are generated, every index.html file under each directory won’t. By looking at diff of sitemap.xml, the plugin seems to generate wrong paths. I’m pretty newbie to Jekyll and how Octopress works with it. Also this is a plugin for Jekyll, not Octopress. So if you have any fix for this problem, please make pull requests to jekyll_alias_generator or just contact me.

jekyll-redirect-from

While searching how to fix this problem, I found jekyll-redirect-from served by Jekyll team. What it does is almost completely same with jekyll_alias_generator. Generates alias HTML files when we set redirect_from key in YAML front matter of the post.

To use this plugin, install jekyll-redirect-from gem by select one option from below:

Add gem 'jekyll-redirect-from' to Gemfile and execute bundle.
Run gem install jekyll-redirect-from on terminal.

Then add it to your _config.yml:

gems:
    - jekyll-redirect-from

Ready to add redirects! You can use this by adding redirect_from to the YAML front matter of your page or post:

redirect_from:
    - /path/to/alias/
    - /path/to/another/alias

You can also specify just one url:

redirect_from: /path/to/alias/

Note that /path/to/alias/ will generate a /path/to/alias/index.html, while /path/to/alias will generate a /path/to/alias.