Redirecting URLs with CloudFlare

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I recently moved my blog from https://codetalk.io (now my commercial site) to https://codethoughts.io. This of course also meant, that everything linking to my old blog was now broken, which is not the best experience for any readers that I might have 😅

I initially considered setting up rewrite rules somewhere for each individual post, but then thought of a much smarter way, using CloudFlare’s Redirect Rules, to instead redirect all direct links to posts and throw them to the new location on codethoughts.io.

The documentation for these rules are a bit sparse, so I thought I’d share how I did. First though, let’s set some context:

• The base domain changed from https://codetalk.io → https://codethoughts.io
• All posts live under the /posts/ path on the domain
• All post slugs are identical in dates and names
• We no longer have a .html ending on the new blog (i.e. what previously might have been https://codetalk.io/posts/a-blog-post.html would now be https://codetalk.io/posts/a-blog-post/)
• We’re on the free CloudFlare plan, so there’s a limit to which expressions we can use

Let’s take a look at how we do this:

• Catching our requests on codetalk.io
• Redirecting to the new location

Catching our requests on codetalk.io

First, we’ll navigate to the relevant place in CloudFlare

• Go into the CloudFlare dashboard
• Select your domain (e.g. codetalk.io)
• Expand Rules in the sidebar
• Select Redirect Rules
• Create a new rule
• Give it an appropriate name, and make sure to select Custom filter expression.

In my case here, I specifically want to limit the logic to when the URI Path starts with the value /posts. CloudFlare will neatly demonstrate that this rule will generate the expression:

(starts_with(http.request.uri.path, "/posts"))

In the Dashboard console it will look something like this:

The Redirect Rules entry for catching incoming requests