301 Redirects in Python uWsgi

scleveland

What's the best way to replicate 301 redirects in the httpd.conf file of an Apache + mod_wsgi environment when switching to a Python/uWsgi application?

sean

uWSGI does redirects via its internal routing system.

If you can give me an example of the type of redirect you want to do I can try to provide a more specific example.

scleveland

Thanks, Sean. I'll dig into that. In the meantime, I would actually like replicate both the Alias and Redirect functionality or the Apache VirtualHost.

Examples:

Alias /sitemap.xml /home/${OPAL_USER}/apps/static/sitemap.xml

Redirect 301 /old/file/path /new/file/path

sean

Ok, for those two examples you would add the following to your uwsgi.ini:

# for Alias
route = /sitemap\.xml static:/home/$(OPAL_USER)/apps/static/sitemap.xml

# for 301 redir
route = /old/file/path redirect-301:/new/file/path

I used the $(OPAL_USER) since that's what you used in your example, but you can replace that with your app's shell username if you need to.

For the 301, if /new/file/path is actually a static file then you'll need a static route for that in addition to the redirect, eg...

route = /new/file/path static:/home/$(OPAL_USER)/apps/static/new/file/path

... although on a production site you should serving all of your static assets from a separate static app and not directly from uWSGI.

Be sure to reload your uWSGI config after updating your uwsgi.ini. If you're running uWSGI from our installer then you can do a reload with the following command:

kill -HUP $( cat /home/user/apps/app/tmp/uwsgi.pid )

scleveland

sean ... although on a production site you should serving all of your static assets from a separate static app and not directly from uWSGI

Follow-up question for you, Sean. I typically do serve files on the /static path from a separate static app, but in the case of a sitemap.xml or robots.txt file, etc., I would like those to reside at the root level of the domain, and not at /static/sitemap.xml. Performance wise, is it better to use the uWsgi routing system, a file-specific site route in the Opalstack dashboard, or something else?

Thanks for your input.

scleveland

Perfect! That's what I needed. Thanks.

sean

scleveland our dashboard doesn't have a concept of a "file-specific route".

Performance-wise it's always better to serve static assets out-of-process, ie from something other than your application server. However, if your app server is serving the root of the site and you have static assets that you want to serve directly from the root then you'll need to either:

Serve them directly from uwsgi
Redirect to them from uwsgi to your static URL, eg: route = /sitemap\.xml redirect-301:https://domain.com/static/sitemap.xml

Either way, uwsgi will be doing a bit of extra work to serve the sitemap.

Also, I'm not sure what impact (if any) redirecting the sitemap would have on SEO.

scleveland

Ok, so a site route cannot include a file extension and can only be used to specify directories?

If so, sounds like from uwsgi is the way to go, as there is unlikely to be a heavy hit on these types of files. I'm also unsure of the SEO impact, but I believe that files like robots.txt and some domain verification files need to be at the root. But perhaps a 301 redirect would be OK.

Thanks.

sean

scleveland Ok, so a site route cannot include a file extension and can only be used to specify directories?

That's correct.