Redirect a filename in Netlify without specifying the path
Posted 26th June 2020 in Development and Serverless
I check my Netlify Analytics every now and again to see what pages people are looking for but not finding, so that I can fix things with redirect in my netlify.toml file.
Most of the human redirects have been fixed, so it’s all just spambots now, looking for /wp-login.php or .env; none of which exist on my server. The latest bot has been looking for a wlwmanifest.xml, and it’s really going for it! So much so that it has taken over 14 of my 15 slots in my Netlify Analytics dashboard, so I can’t see much. I see the following (double initial forward slashes sic):
//wp1/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//wp2/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//test/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//website/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//wp/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//web/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//cms/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//wordpress/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//sito/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//site/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//blog/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml//2018/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
I didn’t fancy adding 14 redirects to my already lengthy netlify.toml file, so I had a search for some way of targeting any wlwmanifest.xml file, regardless of the directory it’s in. Nothing. Not a bean.
But I did some testing on a staging server and worked it out. Here’s how:
[[redirects]]
from = "*/wlwmanifest.xml"
to = "/404"
status = 301
force = trueAll you need is an asterisk before the forward slash, and it will redirect any request for that file, regardless of the directory it’s being looked for in.