What is the best approach for redirection of old pages in Jekyll and GitHub Pages?

Question

I have blog on github pages - jekyll

What is the best way to solve url strategy migration?

I found the best practice in common is create htaccess like so

Answer 1

redirect-from plugin

https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from#redirect-to

It is supported by GitHub and makes it easy:

_config.yml

gems:
  - jekyll-redirect-from

a.md

---
permalink: /a
redirect_to: 'http://example.com'
---

as explained at: https://help.github.com/articles/redirects-on-github-pages/

Now:

firefox localhost:4000/a

will redirect you to example.com.

The plugin takes over whenever the redirect_to is defined by the page.

Tested on GitHub pages v64.

Note: this version has a serious recently fixed bug which wrongly reuses the default layout for the redirect: https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from/pull/106

Manual layout method

If you don't feel like using https://github.com/jekyll/jekyll-redirect-from it's easy to implement it yourself:

a.md

---
layout: 'redirect'
permalink: /a
redir_to: 'http://example.com'
sitemap: false
---

_layouts/redirect.html based on Redirect from an HTML page :

  
  
  {% comment %}
    Don't use 'redirect_to' to avoid conflict
    with the page redirection plugin: if that is defined
    it takes over.
  {% endcomment %}
  
  


  
Redirecting...
  Click here if you are not redirected.
  

Like this example, the redirect-from plugin does not generate 301s, only meta + JavaScript redirects.

We can verify what is going on with:

curl localhost:4000/a