Redirects stopped working?

Support
1

Hey, I noticed that _redirects file stopped working recently. Last week I was using the exact same configuration and it was perfectly fine… so I created this test site to find out what issue could it be.

https://redirects-test.netlify.com/ there are 2 pages - index and Test page. Redirects doesn’t work on either of them, however when I try to visit a page that doesn’t exist, for example /aaa - redirection works just fine. What is the problem here?

_redirects file configuration:
/ https://google.com
/* https://google.com

2

It looks as though you may need to force your redirects or delete those two pages.

3

I think you misunderstood the issue here. Redirections should work on any page, but at the moment it only works on pages that doesn’t exist. It just doesn’t make sense.

4

Did you read this?

5

Hi, @linasv, what @gregraven has said is exactly correct.

What you are seeing is the file shadowing behavior. Quoting the documentation about this:

By default, you can’t shadow a URL that actually exists within the site. This applies to rewrites using a splat or dynamic path segment as well as rewrites for individual routes or files.

The rules themselves look like this:

/   https://google.com
/*   https://google.com

If no status is specified as is done above, the rule is a 301 by default. So, the two rules above are equivalent to this:

/   https://google.com  301
/*   https://google.com 301

Also, these two files exist in the deployed files for this site:

  • index.html
  • test.html

This means these two URLs will not redirect because those “files” exist (note the “empty path” of / only will serve index.html):

There is no file example.html or example/index.html so the following URL does redirect:

If you want all URLs for redirect, even if a shadowed file does exist, then make the rules “forced” rules like so (adding the “!” to each 301 status):

/   https://google.com  301!
/*   https://google.com 301!

If there are other questions about this, please let us know.