Announcing the Astro Cloudflare Redirects integration

A plugin for Astro to automatically generate redirects using Cloudflare's _redirects file specification.

Cloudflare, as part of the Cloudflare Pages platform, has a file specification for redirects, usually defined via a _redirects file. This feature allows you to specify a list of URLs and their destinations, and Cloudflare will automatically redirect traffic to those URLs to the specified destinations.

It looks like this:

/home301 / 301
/home302 / 302
/querystrings /?query=string 301
/twitch https://twitch.tv
/trailing /trailing/ 301
/notrailing/ /nottrailing 301
/page/ /page2/#fragment 301
/blog/* https://blog.my.domain/:splat
/products/:code/:name /products?code=:code&name=:name

This is a helpful way to keep broken URLs from piling up on your site, and I wanted to use it inside of my Astro-based site.

Luckily, the vite-plugin-cloudflare-redirect was created by a member of Astro’s community. I used that Vite plugin and wrapped in an Astro integration package, meaning it’s incredibly easy to install:

$ npx astro add astro-cloudflare-redirects

This will do a guided install to add the integration to your Astro project.

npx astro add astro-cloudflare-redirects
⚠ astro-cloudflare-redirects is not an official Astro package.
✔ Continue? … yes
✔ Resolving with third party packages...

  Astro will run the following command:
  If you skip this step, you can always run it yourself later

 ╭────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
 │ npm install astro-cloudflare-redirects@^0.0.1  │
 ╰────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

✔ Continue? … yes
✔ Installing dependencies...

  Astro will make the following changes to your config file:

 ╭ astro.config.mjs ─────╮
 │ // ...                │
 ╰───────────────────────╯

✔ Continue? … yes

   success  Added the following integration to your project:
  - astro-cloudflare-redirects

You can also install it manually:

$ npm install astro-cloudflare-redirects

Once installed, you can add the integration to your Astro config:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import cloudflareRedirects from 'astro-cloudflare-redirects';

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [cloudflareRedirects()],
});

Usage

You can use it by generating a file in public/_redirects with the same format as the Cloudflare redirects file. For instance, if you wanted to redirect /old-url to /new-url, you could create a _redirects file like this:

/old-url /new-url

You can also specify a custom file location, if you’d like:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import cloudflareRedirects from 'astro-cloudflare-redirects';

export default defineConfig({
  integrations: [cloudflareRedirects({
    redirectsFile: './src/_redirects',
  })],
});

Why build this?

I like Cloudflare’s _redirects file format, but by pulling it into Astro via a Vite plugin, you can use it in any environment. Regardless of how you’re deploying your Astro application, you can use this plugin for easy redirect handling.