Pipeline-free URL Redirects pipeline-free-redirects

For various reasons, organizations rewrite URLs in a way that causes a 301 (or 302) redirect, meaning that the browser is redirected to a different page.

Scenarios include:

AEM as a Cloud Service offers several approaches to implement client-side redirects, but the strategy described in this article, pipeline-free redirects, is a good choice when:

The core of this feature is the ability for AEM Apache/Dispatcher to load (or reload) one or more rewrite map files that have been placed in a specified location in the publish repository. It is important to mention that how the files get there is outside the scope of this feature but you can consider one of the following methods:

The rewrite map rewrite-map

The rewrite map is reloaded (if changed) by the Apache HTTP server every 300 seconds by default (the value is configurable). The file format should follow the plain text key-value map RewriteMap file format described in the Apache documentation.

A file named managed-rewrite-maps.yaml should be created to specify the location of the rewrite map file and it must be deployed once, by using the Cloud Manager full stack pipeline or the web tier pipeline. The file must be created in the src/opt-in folder of your dispatcher configuration. Make sure you use the flexible mode file structure.

You can configure it with the following pattern:

maps:
- name: my.map
  path: <path-in-publish-repository>/redirectmap.txt

If, for example, your chosen method to place the rewrite map file is to ingest it in AEM as an asset named mysite-redirectmap.txt and then publish it, you can specify a folder under /content/dam:

maps:
- name: my.map
  path: /content/dam/redirectmaps/mysite-redirectmap.txt

Next, in an Apache configuration file such as rewrites/rewrite.rules or <yourfile>.vhost, you must configure the map file referenced by the name property (my.map in the sample above).

The RewriteMap directive should indicate that the data is stored in a database manager (DBM) file format by using the sdbm (simple DBM) format.

The rest of the configuration depends on the format of the redirectmap.txt. The simplest format, shown in the sample below, is a one to one mapping between the original url to the mapped url:

# RewriteMap from managed rewrite maps
RewriteMap map.foo dbm=sdbm:/tmp/rewrites/my.map
RewriteCond ${map.foo:$1} !=""
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ ${map.foo:$1|/} [L,R=301]

Considerations considerations

Keep in mind the following: