www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/lighttpd-plone-rewrite-redirect.mdwn

[[!meta title="Mixing redirects and rewrites with lighttpd and Plone"]]

## The situation

As you may already know,
[[I am|blog/restart-to-write-news]]
[[migrating|blog/migration-1-configs]]
[[many of|migration-2-freebsd-raid-monitoring-foss]]
[[my websites|migration-3-ccollect]] into this one.

Today I also began to redirect stuff from my
previous personal website, http://nico.schottelius.org. 
I am (still) running [Plone](http://www.plone.org) on that
site, behind [lighttpd](http://www.lighttpd.net/). The
configuration of lighttpd looks like this:

    $HTTP["host"] =~ "^(nico|nico2)\.schottelius\.org$" {
       url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(.*)" => "/VirtualHostBase/http/nico.schottelius.org/cms/VirtualHostRoot/$1" )
      
       var.logdir           = "/home/server/www/nico/nico.schottelius.org/logs/"
       accesslog.filename   = logdir    + "access.log"

       proxy.server =   ( "" => (                                                           
          ( "host" => "192.168.6.2", "port" => 8082 ),                                      
          ( "host" => "192.168.6.2", "port" => 8083 )
       ))
    }

([[a more detailled version can be found here|configs/lighttpd-zope-http-and-https]])


## The idea

Now I created a new [[about page here|about]] and want to redirect
the old URLs **"^/ueber/nico-schottelius$"** and **"^/about/nico-schottelius$"**
from the Plone site to it.

First I tried the normal redirect like this:

       url.redirect = ( "^/ueber/nico-schottelius$" => "http://www.nico.schottelius.org/about/",
                        "^/about/nico-schottelius$" => "http://www.nico.schottelius.org/about/" )

## The solution

Unfortunately, this did not work. You may already have spotted the bug...
The correct way to redirect pages from lighttpd in front of
[Zope](http://www.zope.org), which does ***rewriting*** is to match on the
**rewritten** path! Thus, the following code does the
[correct redirect](http://nico.schottelius.org/about/nico-schottelius):

    url.redirect = (
      "^/VirtualHostBase/http/nico.schottelius.org/cms/VirtualHostRoot/ueber/nico-schottelius$"
          => "http://www.nico.schottelius.org/about/",
      "^/VirtualHostBase/http/nico.schottelius.org/cms/VirtualHostRoot/about/nico-schottelius$"
          => "http://www.nico.schottelius.org/about/"
    )

You can use [curl](http://curl.haxx.se) to verify the redirect:

    [22:54] ikn% curl -i http://nico.schottelius.org/about/nico-schottelius
    HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
    Location: http://www.nico.schottelius.org/about/
    Content-Length: 0
    Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 21:01:39 GMT
    Server: lighttpd/1.4.19

[[!tag lighttpd plone]]