How to set up redirects properly for the site on Azure Static Webapp using Jekyll

Help
1

Hi all! We made a static website using Jekyll on Azure Static Webapp and faced a dilemma on how to properly set up different types of redirects necessary for SEO and not only.

Some of the main redirects that we need are:

  1. Support Non-Trailing Slash Urls - redirect the Urls with / at the end to the url without it

  2. Remove .html - by default the same pages on jekyll are accessible both with .html and without it, I would like to redirect pages with .html to the same url without it

  3. Implement lower case url rule - so that when typing the url all the upper case letters would convert to the lower case by redirect

  4. http errors - 404 page - by default Azure’s page is shown, I would like to show our own version of it.

The main question is how to implement all these properly. Should we configure redirect in IIS (for example using these list: IIS Rewrite Rules and Resources - RewriteGuide) or there is another way to configure them using Routes (Configure Azure Static Web Apps | Microsoft Docs), or any other.

What is the best option for such configuration? I searched and didn’t find any detailed guide on this in the internet.

2

Hopefully someone with direct Azure experience can chime in, but the Jekyll way to handle redirects is by using the jekyll-redirect-from plugin. That should cover your first three use-cases (if memory serves me right).

I prefer this solution as A) it allows you to port your full site to any host (Github Pages, Netlify, AWS S3, Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, etc) as the need arises - no vendor lock-in, and B) it keeps the site completely serverless - I use Jekyll specifically so I don’t have to monkey with any server settings.

As for the custom 404, most hosts I’ve seen honor a custom 404.md at root. So in root, you’d just add:

404.md

---
layout: default
permalink: /404.html
---

# 404

Page not found! :(

If you don’t hear from anyone on this forum with direct Azure experience in the next day or two, I’d suggest asking again on an Azure-centric forum. Among the big cloud providers, AWS S3 is somewhat popular in these parts, but I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning Azure.

Good luck!

Relevant docs:

3

Thank. I tried to install and set up the jekyll-redirect-from plugin, but it seems that it can redirect only specific url to another one. I didn’t find any general rules I’ve requested above or the opportunity to write complex logic. In the description it works like - set up the new url you’d like you current page to be redirected to. It seems that I have to search for the solution on server side. Anyway, thanks for the help!