Removing all the page aliases from my personal blog

Backwards compatibility through aliases

In my personal blog I had a lot of posts with aliases. The reason is that I have a taste of tinkering with the configuration of my sites, which is a great advantage of having a static website? I guess?

Anyway, my personal blog would have pages with many aliases set. The last configuration —and the one that I like the most— produces the permalinks with the following format: /YYYY/MM/my-post/. A series of previous configs made the permalinks to have many different structures, so that a given post would have the following keys in the frontmatter:

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slug: "/YYYY/MM/my-post/"
aliases: ["/my-post","/blog/my-post","/YYYY/my-post","/YYYY/MM/DD/my-post"]

That situation started to bothering me because I didn’t feel like maintaining so many redirects for historical reasons. When I first used the strategy of putting aliases in old posts was to make sure that whatever new configuration I was trying would be “backwards compatible” and to avoid throwing too many 404 errors.

However, in the last few days I had second thoughts about it and decided to put an end to the aliasing thing.

Looking for the non-compliant files

To change this situation I first needed to know which files I had to change. To achieve that, I wrote the following helper script:

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import frontmatter
from pathlib import Path
from pprint import pprint


pages_with_aliases = {}

content_dir = Path(".", "content").resolve()
for file in content_dir.glob("**/*.md"):
    with file.open("r") as f:
        metadata, _ = frontmatter.parse(f.read())
    if "aliases" in metadata.keys() and len(metadata["aliases"]) > 1:
        index = file.parts.index("content")
        pages_with_aliases[str(Path(*file.parts[index:]))] = metadata["aliases"]

pprint(f"Total files with aliases: {len(pages_with_aliases.keys())}")
pprint("---")

pprint(pages_with_aliases)

I’m using the python-frontmatter library, which freed me from parsing the frontmatter from scratch. I put the script in the root directory of my personal blog and executed it, which gave a list of 97 markdown files (!) that I needed to modify. The output wasn’t too fancy, but it got the work done. Although I could have included logic to directly change the frontmatter in the files, I did modify them all one by one because I wanted to give it a double check.

A different strategy would have been made Hugo ignore the aliases key, but somehow that felt like cheating ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.