RedHead

Motivation

When deploying our website we realized we wanted to have a very subtle difference in the redirects if the environment was staging or production, we could have gone for the ENV variable option, but the netlify.toml file does not allow environment variable interpolation, so you end up having to use a sed command (or multiple) to do the replacement, something like:

sed -i s/REDIRECT_1_PLACEHOLDER/${REDIRECT_1_VALUE}/g netlify.toml
sed -i s/REDIRECT_2_PLACEHOLDER/${REDIRECT_2_VALUE}/g netlify.toml
yarn build

After that, we noticed that many static deployment sites have similar limitations, that lead us to creating RedHead, and now you can simply do:

redhead build && yarn build

Table of content

• Installation
• Supported Platforms
• Usage
• Commands
  • init
  • build
  • help
• Examples
• Contributing
• Credits

Installation

yarn global add redhead

Or you can add it to your package.json

yarn add redhead --dev

$ npm install -g redhead
$ redhead COMMAND
running command...
$ redhead (-v|--version|version)
redhead/0.4.0 darwin-x64 node-v11.9.0
$ redhead --help [COMMAND]
USAGE
  $ redhead COMMAND
...

Supported Platforms

We currently two static deployments, but we plan on adding more (contributions are welcome):

Currently supported

• Netlify
• Firebase Hosting

Plan on supporting

• Heroku

Commands

• redhead build
• redhead help [COMMAND]
• redhead init

redhead build

Generate the platform specific files based on the configuration

USAGE
  $ redhead build

OPTIONS
  -o, --output=output              [default: .] Folder where the generated files should be saved.
  -p, --platform=netlify|firebase  [default: netlify] The target platform for the generated files

See code: src/commands/build.js

redhead help [COMMAND]

display help for redhead

USAGE
  $ redhead help [COMMAND]

ARGUMENTS
  COMMAND  command to show help for

OPTIONS
  --all  see all commands in CLI

See code: @oclif/plugin-help

redhead init

Initialize the required files

USAGE
  $ redhead init

OPTIONS
  -h, --no-headers    Whether or not to handle headers with redhead
  -r, --no-redirects  Whether or not to handle redirects with redhead

DESCRIPTION
  Generates files for handling your headers and/or redirects configuration.

See code: src/commands/init.js

Examples

Different config based on environment

For example, if you want to have different headers based on the environment you just need to customize the headers.js file for your needs and make sure you ENV variables are set for each case, for Netlify this could be done via the netlify.toml file.

// .redhead/headers.js

const headers = [];

if (process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production') {
  headers.push({
    path: '/cool',
    headers: [
      'X-Cool: 123'
    ],
  });
}

module.exports = headers;

Redirecting one path to the latest post

Let's say you have a blog and want to have a /latest path that always takes users to the latest post that has been published, this could be easily achieved with RedHead.

// .redhead/redirects.js

// use your DB library here;
const db = require('db').config(process.env.CONNECTION_URL);
const lastPost = db.posts.last();

module.exports = [{
  from: '/latest',
  to: `${lastPost.permalink}`,
  status: '302',
  options: '',
}];

Contributing

All contributions or issue reporting are welcomed. If you are filing a bug please include information to help debug it!

If you plan to contribute, please make sure you test the code.

Credits