User-defined Redirects

You can set up redirects for a project in your project dashboard’s Redirects page.

Quick Summary

  • Log into your readthedocs.org account.
  • From your dashboard, select the project on which you wish to add redirects.
  • From the project’s top navigation bar, select the Admin tab.
  • From the left navigation menu, select Redirects.
  • In the form box “Redirect Type” select the type of redirect you want. See below for detail.
  • Depending on the redirect type you select, enter FROM and/or TO URL as needed.
  • When finished, click the SUBMIT Button.

Your redirects will be effective immediately.

Redirect Types

Prefix Redirects

The most useful and requested feature of redirects was when migrating to Read the Docs from an old host. You would have your docs served at a previous URL, but that URL would break once you moved them. Read the Docs includes a language and version slug in your documentation, but not all documentation is hosted this way.

Say that you previously had your docs hosted at http://docs.example.com/dev/, you move docs.example.com to point at Read the Docs. So users will have a bookmark saved to a page at http://docs.example.com/dev/install.html.

You can now set a Prefix Redirect that will redirect all 404’s with a prefix to a new place. The example configuration would be:

Type: Prefix Redirect
From URL: /dev/

Your users query would now redirect in the following manner:

docs.example.com/dev/install.html ->
docs.example.com/en/latest/install.html

Where en and latest are the default language and version values for your project.

Note

In other words, a Prefix Redirect removes a prefix from the original URL. This prefix is removed from the rest of the URL’s path after /$lang/$version. For example, if the URL is /es/1.0/guides/tutorial/install.html the “From URL’s prefix” will be removed from /guides/tutorial/install.html part.

Page Redirects

A more specific case is when you move a page around in your docs. The old page will start 404’ing, and your users will be confused. Page Redirects let you redirect a specific page.

Say you move the example.html page into a subdirectory of examples: examples/intro.html. You would set the following configuration:

Type: Page Redirect
From URL: /example.html
To URL: /examples/intro.html

Note that the / at the start doesn’t count the /en/latest, but just the user-controlled section of the URL.

Tip

Page Redirects can redirect URLs outside Read the Docs platform just by defining the “To URL” as the absolute URL you want to redirect to.

Exact Redirects

If you’re redirecting from an old host AND you aren’t maintaining old paths for your documents, a Prefix Redirect won’t suffice and you’ll need to create Exact Redirects to redirect from a specific URL, to a specific page.

Say you’re moving docs.example.com to Read the Docs and want to redirect traffic from an old page at http://docs.example.com/dev/install.html to a new URL of http://docs.example.com/en/latest/installing-your-site.html.

The example configuration would be:

Type: Exact Redirect
From URL: /dev/install.html
To URL:   /en/latest/installing-your-site.html

Your users query would now redirect in the following manner:

docs.example.com/dev/install.html ->
docs.example.com/en/latest/installing-your-site.html

Note that you should insert the desired language for “en” and version for “latest” to achieve the desired redirect.

Exact Redirects could be also useful to redirect a whole sub-path to a different one by using a special $rest keyword in the “From URL”. Let’s say that you want to redirect your readers of your version 2.0 of your documentation under /en/2.0/ because it’s deprecated, to the newest 3.0 version of it at /en/3.0/.

This example would be:

Type: Exact Redirect
From URL: /en/2.0/$rest
To URL: /en/3.0/

The readers of your documentation will now be redirected as:

docs.example.com/en/2.0/dev/install.html ->
docs.example.com/en/3.0/dev/install.html

Tip

Exact Redirects can redirect URLs outside Read the Docs platform just by defining the “To URL” as the absolute URL you want to redirect to.

Sphinx Redirects

We also support redirects for changing the type of documentation Sphinx is building. If you switch between HTMLDir and HTML, your URL’s will change. A page at /en/latest/install.html will be served at /en/latest/install/, or vice versa. The built in redirects for this will handle redirecting users appropriately.

Implementation

Since we serve documentation in a highly available way, we do not run any logic when we’re serving documentation. This means that redirects will only happen in the case of a 404 File Not Found.

In the future we might implement redirect logic in Javascript, but this first version is only implemented in the 404 handlers.