"Another site is already using this domain" error; cannot delete old site or old domain to rectify

Support
1

There are many topics with this error message. I read them all, and I believe my use case is unique enough to warrant creating a new one. Thanks!

“Another site is already using this domain” error trying to set custom domain “v1.kylegach.com” on site “kylegach”

Both sites and domains are mine. “v1-kylegach” is my old site. It fails builds and I don’t want to mess with fixing it, so I used the drag-and-drop, manual deploy feature to publish one final update.

Because of the need to manual deploy, I couldn’t use branch subdomains to differentiate between the old and new site. (At least, I think my understanding there is correct.) Instead, I made an entirely new site (attached to a new repo), “kylegach”.

Now I wish to redirect some paths from the new site to the old (to prevent link rot). I finally discovered (it’s not terribly obvious) that you can only redirect among domains associated with the site, so I tried to add the old site’s domain, “v1.kylegach.com”, as a domain alias to the new site, “kylegach”. Doing so threw the error above.

Is there a path forward here?

Thanks,

Kyle

2

Hey Kyle,
Thanks for reading through the other posts about this error- it’s true, there are ~1 million ways to stumble across it.

Am I understanding correctly that you have these two sites?

  1. Netlify URL: kylegach (new)
    Custom domain: kylegach.com

  2. Netlify URL: v1-kylegach (old)
    Custom domain: v1.kylegach.com

If that’s right, I would assume that a _redirects like this on your new site would work:

/writing/*   https://v1-kylegach.netlify.com/writing/:splat   200!

Modeling off of this:

Is that not the case? Can you share what redirects you’ve tried so far?

3

Thank you for the quick response, Jen.

Here are the redirects I attempted, located in netlify.toml:

[[redirects]]
  from = "/colophon/"
  to = "https://v1.kylegach.com/colophon/"
  status = 307

[[redirects]]
  from = "/resume/"
  to = "https://v1.kylegach.com/resume/"
  status = 307

[[redirects]]
  from = "/work/"
  to = "https://v1.kylegach.com/work/"
  status = 307

[[redirects]]
  from = "/work/*"
  to = "https://v1.kylegach.com/work/:splat"
  status = 301

I also tried the equivalent in _redirects, with similar results.

I noticed your example redirects to v1-kylegach.netlify.com rather than v1.kylegach.com. Will that somehow also redirect to the latter?

4

Hey @kylegach,

Our bad – Netlify doesn’t support 307 redirects! Hit these with a 301 and you should have a little more luck.

Failing that, you may wish to remove the trailing slashes from your redirects. These too can be problematic.

Please, let me know if this helps!

5

Thank you, Scott. I opted to continue using HTML redirects for the 307 cases, and when I removed those so that the only redirect in the file was a 301, it worked.

I couldn’t find anything about the supported http response codes in your docs, just this page: Redirects and rewrites | Netlify Docs. Seems like that should be included there…

(Sorry for the delayed response, btw. I was in the middle of other work that prevented me from easily publishing a change.)

6

Hey @kylegach, glad to hear it’s working and thank you for the feedback! We’ve taken it on board and we’ll close the loop if we look to support 303/307s in the future.