TableauRedirectsExtension - Cool URIs don't change with Tableau

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Over the last several months, I’ve been using Tableau to rebuild my long-neglected website. Tableau is part of the Elixir Tools project headed by @mhanberg, and is built on top of MDEx by @leandrocp. This library is one of ten libraries and Elixir extensions that I built. Most of these were built with the assistance of Kiro.

TableauRedirectsExtension is a Tableau extension for generating redirects because Cool URIs don’t change. Redirects are specified in configuration and content metadata and can generate HTML redirects or a JSON redirect map to produce redirect configurations for Caddy, nginx, Apache, or other servers.

HTML Meta-Refresh Redirects

When serving a Tableau site via AWS S3 or similar scenarios, it is often necessary to produce browser-based redirects using HTML files with the “meta refresh” approach. This is generated for directory-style paths and HTML-like files (.html, .htm, and .php). Other redirects configured (redirecting a .jpg to a .svg, for example) will not be written in this way.

config :tableau, TableauRedirectsExtension,
  redirects: %{"/old-url/" => "/new-url/"}

<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- /old-url/index.html -->
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Redirecting to /new-url/…</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="/new-url/">
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=/new-url/">
<p>Redirecting to <a href="/new-url/">/new-url/</a>…</p>

JSON Manifest Redirects

When a Tableau site is behind another server like Caddy, Apache, or nginx it is often better to use the generated redirects.json to generate appropriate redirect configuration files. The configuration (and content metadata) produce the mapping:

config :tableau, TableauRedirectsExtension,
  redirects: %{"/old-url/" => "/new-url/"}

{
  "permanent_redirects": [
    {
      "from": ["/old", "/old/", "/old/index.html"],
      "type": "path",
      "to": "/new/",
      "target_type": "internal"
    }
  ]
}

Which can then be converted into a Caddyfile for inclusion:

redir /old-url /new-url permanent
redir /old-url/ /new-url permanent
redir /old-url/index.html /new-url permanent

Configuration

Configuration may be either global (for content that has been removed but redirects to somewhere that is either useful or explains) or specified in the content frontmatter metadata.

Global Redirects

config :tableau, TableauRedirectsExtension,
  enabled: true,
  html: %{enabled: true, message: "Redirecting..."},
  json: %{enabled: true},
  redirects: %{
    "/old-path/" => "/new-path/",
    "/external/" => "https://example.com",
    "/bad-info/" => "/removed/#bad-info"
  }

Frontmatter Redirects

---
title: My Post
permalink: /posts/my-post/
redirects:
  aliases:
    - /blog/old-post
    - /old-location/post
  fragments:
    /other-old-post: "#new-section"
---

An alias redirect goes to the content’s permalink, whereas a fragment redirect goes to the content’s permalink at a specific URI fragment.

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