On one of the sites I work on, I used to have a NavLink set as /community/ and I had a redirect file setup as such:
/community https://community.website.com
And the redirect worked just fine even though I never setup the subdomain. So whenever the NavLink was clicked you would be redirect to a nonexistent domain. Now I have setup the site but it is under a different subdomain so I changed the NavLink to /support/ and the redirect file to:
/support https://support.website.com
But when I click the NavLink it takes me to the actual page website.com/support which shows the VuePress 404 page since there is no such page rendered. But the confusing part is if I refresh the page it redirects me immediately like it should of in the first place. And to add to that if I revert everything back to community and the old subdomain the redirect works correctly (Takes you to community.website.com).
I am at a lose here on what is causing this as well as whether it is a Netlify or VuePress issue. Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
If you’re using router-link instead of anchor tags then the built in router is going to try to handle the route, since it doesn’t exist you’ll get VuePress built-in 404 rather than the Netlify redirect. The Netlify redirect only works if the request is made to our servers, we can’t control routing that happens clientside in your Javascript.
I get what is going on as far as the built-in 404 and how the router works. I can also have the NavLink as an external link which would alleviate the issue except I do not want the site to know its an external as well as the external link icon.
But all of that is null because it worked perfectly fine with the word community but me switching it to support makes it no longer work. I did not want to post actual links to the site but will to show what I am talking about.
Here is an old deploy that had the community link in the nav bar. When you click it, it takes you to a blank page briefly and then the redirect fires and you are forwarded to the subdomain.
But here is what I am working with currently and the only difference is that the community words in the config for the NavLink and the community words in the redirect are swapped out for the word support and yet it does not work the same.
So like I said in the original post, it worked correctly before the change but now it does not and that’s what is confusing about this whole thing.
I can confirm that our system processed the redirects in both cases correctly, on the old community and the new support page.
And I can confirm that those are also the only redirects in place on the site, so there isn’t a competing /* redirect or something else that differed.
Here’s what IS different:
In the first deploy, you have content at the /community/index.html path (we serve that for the URL /community)
In the second deploy, you have NO content at the /support path or at /support/index.html, so you get the 404.