Redirect Page Not Found

I’m currently trying to migrate from GitHub Pages to Netlify for my personal websites. I have them set up as separate repositories all on the same domain as subfolders. I have them set up, but I can’t get the redirect to work. For example, I have sourdoughcalc.netlify.app. I have it set up on my custom domain as https://sourdough.[fullname].com. I want to host it at www.[fullname].com/Sourdough-Calculator. I have a _redirects file in that repository which is

/Sourdough-Calculator https://sourdough.[fullname].com 200

My Deploy Summary for this site says

1 redirect rule processed

All redirect rules deployed without errors.

However, when I try to visit www.[fullname].com/Sourdough-Calculator, I get a 404 page. What do I need to do differently?

@emilies Welcome to the Netlify community.

Please provide your Netlify site name, domains, and other information when you post. The better the post = the faster we can help!

I’d rather not post my domain, which is my full name, out in the open for what I feel like are pretty obvious reasons. If you or anyone are able to help with this amount of information that would be great, otherwise I would also be happy to discuss it privately with someone.

I ended up solving this by including this line in the _redirects file in the base domain (www.[fullname].com) repository, instead of in the project repository.

/Sourdough-Calculator/* https://sourdough.[fullname].com/:splat 200

I figured it out after reading this thread: How to redirect? - #6 by fool
For the future, I think the documentation could be improved, or better yet, working with redirects could be in the domain settings on the Netlify dashboard.

hi emilies, glad you figured it out! do you have more specific information on where the redirects were not as clear as they could be? i am happy to look into this and see if we can make things more clear.

In general, more examples would be good, especially of them being used in ways like I was trying to. It was very unclear which repository to include the _redirects file in, and doing this isn’t mentioned at all in the documentation. I found many threads of people trying to do similar things without much luck. Splats are also only mentioned briefly, and not at all in the main Redirects doc page. In general, it would be good to be more thorough rather than less in the documentation, especially since some people (me included) will be coming to it without much of a background in servers and web hosting.

It would also be nice to have some way to test if a rule would work without deploying, as now I have a dozen plus commits that are just me trying different rules trying to work it out. I found the playground which tells you if a rule is valid, but that’s very different from it doing what it’s intended. This is partially why I suggested allowing it to be changed in the dashboard.

great - thanks for the detailed feedback, @emilies. I appreciate you taking the time! Lots of good thoughts on how we might improve things.