We strongly believe that using the redirection.io manager is a nice way to manage the traffic of websites at scale, and that it offers many nice features to create redirects or traffic management rules.

However, there are some cases where you would want to avoid using the graphical interface to create redirection rules:

• to create a large number of rules, if the CSV import format is not flexible enough for your requirements;
• to create a rule when a given event occurs (for example, when the URL of one page changes in your Content Management System);
• when you want a complete control over the created rule (attach many markers, use complex triggers or actions, etc.).

There are indeed many cases where it may be desirable to be able to create rules without human intervention! This is why we have launched, earlier this week, a new version of our public API. In a few words, the newly available API endpoints allow to retrieve the projects of an organization, list both the published and draft rules, create, edit or delete rules (and drafts), publish the draft changes.

The API supports all types of triggers, actions, markers and variables - which means that web traffic automation can be taken to another level!

An OpenAPI specification is available at https://api.redirection.io/docs.json and a tutorial has been published in our documentation. Let us know your feelings about our API!

👉 API documentation: https://api.redirection.io/

As redirection.io is becoming more and more used by large organizations, the roles and permissions orchestration within a project can become quite challenging to set up. Moreover, redirection.io offers a large panel of actions and empowers our customers with many new possibilities towards the traffic of their website... and with great power come a great responsibility 🙂

Some large organizations requested the ability to restrict permissions by path, to prevent customers to manage the traffic outside the site sections under their responsibility. Several use-case were suggested:

• in international contexts, it can be desirable that various users of the same project can only manage disjoint parts of the website. For example, the French marketing team should be authorized to manage redirects under /fr, but not under /de or /uk, which should be reserved respectively to the German and British teams
• the customers support team of a company should be able to manage the rules under the /faq path, while the /shop part of the website should only be managed by the eCommerce team
• etc.

We have therefore introduced a new concept: the project segmentation. From now on, "Pro" plan projects can define segments at the project level, which help organize rules and can be used to restrict the permissions of users within the project.

How to create project segments¶

Organization and project Administrators can add, edit and delete segments under the "Segments" tab, in the project settings:

In order to add a segment, click on the "Add a segment" button, and fill in the form:

You can add as many conditions as you want: all the rules for which the "Source URL" starts with one of the provided strings will be considered as part of the segment. This means that several segments can share some URLs. It also means that a segment can be a restriction on a given domain, or even on a given protocol (scheme).

How to restrict a member to one or several segments¶

Once segments have been defined, project members can be attached to one or more segments, to restrict their rules edition permissions. It is even possible to define a segment restriction directly when inviting a user in the project:

1. Go to the "members" tab, on the project settings screen. Hit the "Invite another user", and choose either the "Contributor" or "Publisher" role. The "Segments restrictions" dropdown appears and lets you choose one or more segments that must be attached to this user once the invitation will be accepted.
2. The segments are displayed on the members list
3. A user with segment restrictions will only be allowed to create rules for which the "Source URL" starts with one of its segments contraints.

Segment-restricted users have limited actions:

• they cannot create or edit rules for which the Source URL does not match their segment restrictions
• they cannot mark for deletion rules that are not part of their segments
• a Publisher with segment restriction can only publish rules within their segment. If some draft rules are not part of the Publisher segment(s), they won't be published, and will remain untouched
• a Publisher with segment restrictions cannot rollback to a previous version of the ruleset, as this could introduce changes outside his segment restrictions

Bonus: filter the rules based on their segment¶

Whatever their segment restrictions, all the project members can see the list of all the rules that have been configured in the project. However, as a user it can sometimes be useful to list only the rules that you can edit - so, a new "Segment" filter has been added in the rules list screen. It allows to isolate the rules that are specific to one or more segments:

With this new "segments" feature, redirection.io adds a new layer of fine-grained administration capabilities, to help delegate the traffic management to several entities within large organizations and websites. The feature is available as of today for all the "Pro" organizations!

➡ Read the full documentation about Project segments

As of today, it is possible to temporarily disable a rule using a new "Enable the rule" switch in the rule edition form. All the pre-existing rules have been let enabled by default, and all future traffic management rules will be enabled by default. Just hit the switch to have the rule be disabled.

👉 Please note that, after you have enabled or disabled a rule, you still have to publish this change (as any other change you would make in your ruleset) for it to be applied on your production website.

One could wonder why such a feature was not available in the past 🤔 In fact, it has always been possible to remove a rule and re-enable it later on, by using the rules history mechanism, which allows to restore a past ruleset. This new feature just makes it a lot easier and straightforward to temporarily shutdown one or more rules and still keep them on hand, so it can be re-enabled in a quick way when needed.

On the other side, it may sound weird to want to temporarily disable one or more redirects on your website. This feature has been requested by several customers and can be used in several use cases:

• to prepare a set of new rules that will have to be enabled in a few days only;
• to execute a rule only during certain periods, and to be able to deactivate it outside these time slots;
• to perform A/B tests on redirection targets.

Prepare a set of new redirect rules upfront¶

Imagine that a new country section is being launched on your website in a few days. The rollout of these country pages will come with a set of new redirects, that you will want to enable only when the new section goes live. Using the "enable / disable" feature, you can now prepare the new rules, and enable these rules when the backend website is ready.

Execute a rule only during certain periods¶

Imagine that a section of your online store is only opened during event sales, which take place on the first Wednesday of the month. The rest of the time, you prefer a redirect to a specific landing page of your website. Disabling this redirect rule to open the event sales shopping page(s) is a quick way to "open the doors" 🔓🚪

Run A/B redirect tests¶

You could also want to test a set of redirects over a certain period of time, measure their effectiveness on your business / revenue, and eventually re-enable those rules if necessary.

📖 Read the full documentation about enabling or disabling redirection.io rules

redirection.io offers several ways to be notified when things happen on your website or in your project.

We have launched today new "team notifications", to keep your team or coworkers informed of the occurrence of an event in the redirection.io project. For the moment, the notification feature is able to send notifications to Slack channels, email addresses (a mailing-list, for example) or to webhook URLs (for automation).

This feature is available only to "Pro" plans and is designed to keep your colleagues informed that something is happening in the project. This "something" can be an event of different types:

• a rules import has been completed;
• new rules have been published;
• a crawl has been started, or is completed.

➡ Read the full documentation about project notifications. We are opened to suggestions on new notification channels to add (or new events), so feel free to ask us! 💌

As a sidenote, redirection.io already features several other notification types:

• personal notifications, available in the user account settings (new logins, 2FA is enabled or disabled, etc.)
• a project "weekly digest" email, to get informed of the evolution of your website's traffic

Many redirection.io users have made our logs trail a central part of their strategy to discover traffic issues, and ultimately ensure that their website is running smoothly. Some of them even explained us that they keep a sticky browser tab with redirection.io opened, to regularly check "how things go well".

But in the meantime, some other redirection.io users were missing a long-asked feature, a regular reminder that would ping them if something was going wrong. While redirection.io is a great solution to monitor the traffic of your website and ensure that it runs well without issues, not everyone has the reflex to check the logs on a daily basis. As they say: what works too well tends to be forgotten!

This is the reason why we are launching today a new weekly digest email, available to all our customers right now 🎉 It features all the important information about your project, and all the events that occurred the week before:

• how did the traffic evolve? 📈
• did new errors happen, that should need some attention (and maybe new redirect rules)? 🔃
• how is your project secure? Did you enable 2FA? 🔐
• were new rules published in the project? ✍
• are your redirection.io agent instances healthy, or do they need upgrades? ⏩

For more readability and efficiency, the weekly digest email embeds some charts so you can notice issues in a matter of seconds:

To enable this new weekly digest, head to your profile preferences. There, you can subscribe to receive this weekly email for all or some of your projects. Of course, if you manage dozen of projects, you may not want to receive as many emails as you have projects, so pick only the most important ones!

Once done, simply wait for next Monday morning, and you'll get some news of your website 🙂

With time fleeing, some redirection.io company organizations have been growing and have become so large that it can be a bit hard to figure out who performed actions in the organization projects.

In the meantime, we have been adding several features: new rule actions, introduced at the beginning of 2021, new publication roles and a redesign of the invitation features, our public API (currently in private beta), the redirection.io website crawler, etc., and it can become a bit cumbersome, in large organizations, to get a full overview of who is performing actions.

This is why we are introducing a new audit trail feature, in order to help organization administrators understand and audit which users are actively using the redirection.io solution within their organization.

This audit trail is available for every redirection.io organizations, whatever the plan - we always considered security is a first-class citizen, and strive to provide all our users with tools that can help them ensure security and traceability within their web platform. Security should not be a paid option.

The audit trail for your organization can be read by org administrators under the organization settings. We have begun logging events at the beginning of October 2021, so you will not find any event prior to that date.

📖 In order to learn more about the audit trail, please read our documentation section about the audit trail.

We have rolled out today a new feature for all redirection.io customers: marker templates.

Markers are the way in redirection.io to define URL patterns, which are useful to create wildcard redirection rules that will apply to several URLs at once.

For example, defining a Trigger with /shop/<REFERENCE>.html as the Source URL will match all the requests to a URL of this form: /shop/ref-a12.html, /shop/ref-12-34-56.html, etc.

In large redirection plans, it can be a little bit repetitive to define the same marker in several rules. The rules import tool already allows to create markers dynamically for many rules at once, but it does not help to update existing rules.

This is the reason why we have decided to introduce the concept of marker templates. In a few words, you can now define, at the project level, a set of markers that can be easily reused in several rules of the project. When a marker template is updated, you can update the rules which use this template: maintaining project-wide patterns is easier and more flexible than before! Using a project-wide marker template when creating a new redirection rule saves you a few clicks, for more productive and easy rules management:

Want to lean more ? Read our documentation about marker templates in our documentation 🧑‍🎓

There are releases around the corner today! We have just published the 2.2.0 releases for the redirection.io agent, the Apache and nginx modules. These releases introduce several new features, that should be of great use for system administrators.

agent improvements¶

The agent now supports two command line options:

• --version displays the version of the agent,
• --test can be used to test the configuration file and display possible errors before reloading the agent.

Also, we have added a metrics HTTP endpoint in the agent, which can be enabled in the agent configuration, and used in your monitoring tools to collect some data about the behavior of the agent.

nginx and Apache module changes¶

Some new features have also been added in the 2.2.0 versions of the nginx and Apache modules. First, it is now possible to configure how the connection pool is managed between the webserver and the redirection.io agent. See the documentation about these options, for both nginx and Apache.

We have also introduced a new redirectionio_set_header / RedirectionioSetHeader virtualhost directive, which allows to map some Apache or nginx variables as request headers when the request is inspected by the redirection.io agent. This may sound a bit obscure, but it opens up many possibilities for redirection.io automation. For example, it means that you can now create rules which can be triggered based on variables created by other server modules - we will tell you more about use cases in a few days.

We are announcing today two great improvements for your account and website security.

As of now, we support authenticating to redirection.io using a Google or a Microsoft account. If you used to login using your email and password, you can now safely login with Google or Microsoft, too. If logging in with an existing email address, you will continue to see your organizations and projets, like before.

For users who prefer to login using an email and a password, we have added the possibility to setup Two-factor authentication. We urge our customers to enable it and raise the level of protection of their redirection.io accounts.

Both of these new features are explained in details in the "User account and preferences" documentation page.

In the next weeks, we will allow organization administrators to enforce Two-factor authentication for all the users of their organization.

These new features are available to all our customers, whatever their projects plans, because we believe that security is a first class citizen.

Today is a great day for redirection.io! We have released the v2.0.0 of the redirectionio-agent, the software component that runs redirection rules on the websites of our customers. This new version is the result of several months of hard work and includes many improvements. in addition to better overall agent performance, this release introduces new triggers and actions that will allow a much more powerful use of redirection.io.

Starting today, redirection.io users can create rules that are triggered by:

• the URL (or URL pattern)
• the HTTP method of the request
• the status code of the backend response
• the value of a request header

Used to create redirection rules? You can still do it with the new agent, of course, and you can also:

• override HTML meta tags (you know, the <title> tag at the top of every web page?)
• set the value of a response header
• inject arbitrary HTML code in your web pages

In the coming months, we will be adding more triggers and actions. However, for now, it means that configuring the following behaviors only takes a few clicks with redirection.io:

• I want to 302 redirect all the requests under /products/* for which the backend responded with a 404 - this can be useful to avoid 404 errors in product catalog pages, for example ;
• I want to 302 redirect the user to /fr if the X-GeoIP request header is defined and its value starts with fr
• I want to change the meta title and meta description on the page /products/example-product.html
• I want to add a meta og:image on every page of my website
• I want to add a x-frame-options response header to all the responses of my website, and set its value to SAMEORIGIN

Want more triggers or actions? Let us know!

• Read more about triggers and actions ⚡
• Read the detailed changelog