Installation

To install the redirects app, follow these two steps:

1. Add "django.contrib.redirects" to your INSTALLED_APPS setting.
2. Add "django.contrib.redirects.middleware.RedirectFallbackMiddleware" to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting.
3. Run the command django-admin.py install redirects.

How it works

django-admin.py install redirects creates a django_redirects table in your database. This is a simple lookup table with site_id, old_path and new_path fields.

The RedirectFallbackMiddleware does all of the work. Each time any Django application raises a 404 error, this middleware checks the redirects database for the requested URL as a last resort. Specifically, it checks for a redirect with the given old_path with a site ID that corresponds to the SITE_ID setting.

• If it finds a match, and new_path is not empty, it redirects to new_path.
• If it finds a match, and new_path is empty, it sends a 410 ("Gone") HTTP header and empty (content-less) response.
• If it doesn't find a match, the request continues to be processed as usual.

The middleware only gets activated for 404s -- not for 500s or responses of any other status code.

Note that the order of MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES matters. Generally, you can put RedirectFallbackMiddleware at the end of the list, because it's a last resort.

For more on middleware, read the middleware docs.

How to add, change and delete redirects