hugo/docs/content/extras/aliases.md
Rick Cogley 6b5ed88cde Edits on aliases, comments, theme customizing
Fleshed out aliases section, loading the "redirect" keyword so that it's easier to find. Specifically added a "how aliases work" section.

Added Discourse to comments section.

Fleshed out themes/customizing, because it seems to be the source of a lot of questions on the forum.
2015-05-16 15:38:18 +02:00

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---
aliases:
- /doc/redirects/
- /doc/alias/
- /doc/aliases/
date: 2013-07-09
menu:
main:
parent: extras
next: /extras/builders
prev: /taxonomies/ordering
title: Aliases
weight: 10
---
For people migrating existing published content to Hugo, there's a good chance you need a mechanism to handle redirecting old URLs.
Luckily, redirects can be handled easily with _aliases_ in Hugo.
## Example
Given a post on your current Hugo site, with a path of:
``content/posts/my-awesome-blog-post.md``
... you create an "aliases" section in the frontmatter of your post, and add previous paths to that.
### TOML frontmatter
~~~yaml
+++
...
aliases = [
"/posts/my-original-url/",
"/2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html"
]
...
+++
~~~
### YAML frontmatter
~~~yaml
---
...
aliases:
- /posts/my-original-url/
- /2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html
...
---
~~~
Now when you visit any of the locations specified in aliases, _assuming the same site domain_, you'll be redirected to the page they are specified on.
## Important Behaviors
1. *Hugo makes no assumptions about aliases. They also don't change based
on your UglyUrls setting. You need to provide absolute path to your webroot and the
complete filename or directory.*
2. *Aliases are rendered prior to any content and will be overwritten by
any content with the same location.*
## How Hugo Aliases Work
When aliases are specified, Hugo creates a physical folder structure to match the alias entry, and, an html file specifying the canonical URL for the page, and a redirect target.
Assuming a baseurl of `mysite.tld`, the contents of the html file will look something like:
~~~html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.tld/posts/my-original-url"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=http://mysite.tld/posts/my-original-url"/>
</head>
</html>
~~~
The `http-equiv="refresh"` line is what performs the redirect, in 0 seconds in this case.