Reroute old content (.html/.php etc.) to Ruby on Rails

Question

Hi together,

I have switched to Ruby on Rails and my current problem is to reroute the old contents like XXX/dummy.html or XXX/dummy.php in RoR.

What exactly is the best solution for

1. isolated content (XXX/onlyinstance.html)
2. content which has a internal structure like XXX/dummy1.html, XXX/dummy2.html

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html does not explain how to migrate old content.

Note: Changing the old links is NOT an option. The website is hosted, it is not my own server. As the domain hasn't changed, the solution to redirect it seems to be unnecessary...there should be a better solution.

EDIT: I have found out that the best solution is in fact rerouting it by the way weppos described.

So add a .htaccess file in the public directory and write

RewriteEngine on
Redirect permanent /XXX.php http://XYZ/XXX

For whatever reason, RoR did not accept rerouting in routes.rb...while .html/.xml all goes fine, .php does not function. I haven't found out why. Because weppos answer was the best, I will award him a 50 point bounty, but as the others answers are valid, too, I will upvote them. Thank you all

Answer 1

What do you mean by migrating? I recommend to redirect clients to use the RoR URLs. This can be done using HTTP 301 status codes. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_301:

The HTTP response status code 301 Moved Permanently is used for permanent redirection.

This can be done in the configuration of your HTTP server.

Answer 2

You have to redefine your application since Rails uses RESTful routing (as you probably have read). So in order to have a php file which handles show, creating,destroying, etc of items, you need to build a item Model, Controller and views for the different actions.

The static HTML files you can copy to the public directory, since that is the same. The structure you used can still be the same.

In order to modify your routing you have to add map.resource to your config/routes.rb file. This implements the RESTful routes to your controller. To start use the webserver provided by Rails (WEBrick), by entering the script/server command. Later when you have more experience you could think of switching to another server if WEBrick is not sufficient.

I suggest you start writing a basic (blog) application with Rails first, see here. So you see what parts is Rails using and how you can use them.

Afterwards you are able to identify these parts in you PHP solution and are bbetter capable to convert your pages. At least I followed this approach when I started to use/convert to Rails from PHP.

Answer 3

You can do this in multiple ways.

The best and most efficient way is to use your front end web server. You can easily setup some configurations in order to redirect all the old URLs to the new ones.

With Apache, you can use mod_alias and mod_rewrite.

Redirect /XXX/onlyinstance.html /new/path
RedirectMatch ˆ/XXX/dummy([\d])+\.html$ /new/path/$1

This is the most efficient way both for server and client because handled at server level without the need to initialize the Ruby interpreter.

If you can't/wan't take advantage of server settings, you can decide to use Rails itself. Talking about performance, the most efficient way is to use a Rack middleware which is much more efficient than creating a full controller/action.

class Redirector
  def self.call(env)
    if env["PATH_INFO"] =~ %r{XXX/onlyinstance\.html}
      [301, {"Content-Type" => "text/html", "Location" => "http://host/new/path/}, "Redirecting"]
    else
      [404, {"Content-Type" => "text/html"}, "Not Found"]
    end
  end
end

There is also a Rails plugin which provides a nice DLS for configuring redirects using Rack middleware, but I can't find it right now.

Just a footnote. I won't creating additional routes using routes.rb because you'll end up duplicating your site URLs and wasting additional memory.

See also http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1706247/redirect-non-www-requests-to-www-urls-in-rails