Caddy: Redirect root ("/") only

[thomasheller]

1. What version of Caddy are you running (caddy -version)?

Caddy 0.9.5

2. What are you trying to do?

Redirect from "/" to "/xyz".

3. What is your entire Caddyfile?

localhost

redir / /xyz 302

4. How did you run Caddy (give the full command and describe the execution environment)?

caddy (on Linux, using a binary downloaded from caddyserver.com with locale addon)

5. What did you expect to see?

When requesting http://localhost:2015 I would expect the browser to be redirected to http://localhost:2015/xyz (or ultimately http://localhost:2015/xyz/).

6. What did you see instead (give full error messages and/or log)?

The browser gets caught up in an infinite redirect loop (ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS in Chrome).

7. How can someone who is starting from scratch reproduce this behavior as minimally as possible?

Create a directory, put the above Caddyfile in it. Create a sub-directory called xyz containing an index.html with any content (hello world). Run Caddy.

---

As I understand from the docs, the redir directive treats / as a special catch-all value. How would I change this behavior so that it literally just redirects / and nothing else?

[thomasheller]

I came up with the following workaround Caddyfile:

localhost/xyz {
  root xyz
}

localhost {
  redir / /xyz 302
}

This basically works. Until you create another sub-directory xyz/foo (with an index.html). Then it leads to issue #1327 (if the trailing slash is omitted).

[nottrobin]

That's a helpful solution @thomasheller. But it seems to me this should be fixed, so that /applies simply to the / route. The catch-all behaviour seems unnecessary - because as far as I'm aware simply ommitting the first parameter makes it a catch-all doesn't it? Aren't the following two currently equivalent?

redir / /xyz 302
redir /xyz 302

Because if so, I think it would be much more obvious is the former related to a literal / instead.

[thomasheller]

@nottrobin Currently, both directives are equivalent. Internally, redir /xyz is basically an alias for redir / /xyz (see redirect/setup.go).

If would be helpful though to introduce a distinction here as you suggested.

What I intend (omitted in the above examples) is to redirect from / to different sub-directories depending on the user's locale. Using the workaround, I would have to declare each directory as its own site in Caddyfile, duplicating all the directives for each site. If it would be possible to redirect / only, a single site would suffice. In this case, a fix would really simplify things.

Would there be any downside to fixing this -- except that it can break existing Caddyfiles?

[thomasheller]

Ah, I guess for now the correct solution (using a single site) is as follows:

localhost

redir 302 {
  if {path} is /
  / /xyz
}

[mholt]

Yeah, sorry it's not ideal, it's just that the catch-all redirect seems to be more common (and useful) in general. I'm strongly considering a particular Caddyfile upgrade for version 2.0 (we're nearing 1.0, for reference) that will make it a little easier, and give the Caddyfile better request matching powers, while hopefully keeping it nice and simple. But, someday. :)

[virtualdxs]

@mholt Can this be reconsidered? I've run into this multiple times. Just redir 302 is a catch-all, correct?

[Macil]

Because they're treated the same, there doesn't seem to be a way to have separate redirects for / and catch-all.

I'm changing my domain and URL structure, so I want to 301-redirect some specific popular old pages to their new location in the new domain, I want to 301-redirect the root to the new domain's root, and I want a catch-all 302-redirect to the new domain's root (so I'm able to add more 301 redirects later on in case I forgot about any old important popular/bookmarked URLs). Generally I'm pretty cautious about 301 redirects because I've bitten myself hard before with them.

http://localhost:8080 {
    redir /coolpage http://new.example.com/2018/coolpage
    redir {
        if {path} is /
        / http://new.example.com
    }
    redir / http://new.example.com 302
}

results in:

Activating privacy features... done.
2018/06/03 01:57:17 Caddyfile:7 - Error during parsing: rule with duplicate 'from' value: / -> http://new.example.com

[ekini]

Just a heads up I've achieved the required redirections with the following:

rewrite ^/$ /xyz
redir /xyz https://new.example.com/xyz
redir / https://new.example.com{uri}

but I guess for it to work the redirection should be to a different domain.

[mholt]

FWIW, in Caddy 2, this is done simply by:

redir / https://new.example.com{uri}

since path matching is exact by default.

[nolanl]

FWIW, in Caddy 2, this is done simply by:

redir / https://new.example.com{uri}

since path matching is exact by default.

Is it? The following doesn't work for me:

git.example.com {
  redir / https://github.com/newname permanent
  route /oldname/* {
     uri replace /oldname/ /newname/
     redir https://github.com{uri} permanent
  }
}

The goal is to redirect requests to the old project's name gitlab instance to the new project's name github, but send the / url to the new project, not the github homepage. What happens in practice is that / gets redirected to github's homepage.

[francislavoie]

@nolanl works fine for me:

Caddyfile:

:8881

redir / https://github.com/caddyserver

curl:

$ curl -v localhost:8881
* Rebuilt URL to: localhost:8881/
*   Trying ::1...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to localhost (::1) port 8881 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:8881
> User-Agent: curl/7.55.1
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 302 Found
< Location: https://github.com/caddyserver
< Server: Caddy
< Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2020 05:00:42 GMT
< Content-Length: 0
<
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact

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