495824 - Set up tests for our redirects

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[David Boswell]

Someone wrote in to the webmaster address recently to let us know one of our redirects isn't working:

I found a redirection strange behaviour :
Opening : http://mozilla.org/webtools
…redirects to : http://cvs-www.mozilla.org/webtools
…and leads to : "Address not found".

Is there a way to test the redirects to make sure none of them are broken?  Maybe we can also test to see if there are any duplicates, or redirects going through multiple hops, or test for other things?  Part of this may also involve just cleaning up the .htaccess files to make them easier for us to spot errors and maintain them.

Also not sure if this would be part of any larger tests to check for broken links in web pages or not.

Comment 1

[David Boswell]

Bug 496250 is another example of a broken redirect reported by someone.

Comment 2

[David Boswell]

I just noticed today that there are two different redirects in the main .htaccess file that seem to be doing the same thing in different ways:

RewriteRule ^download http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ [R]
RedirectMatch permanent /download(/.*)?$ http://www.mozilla.org/projects/

Perhaps this is something else that can be tested for and cleaned up.

Comment 3

[David Boswell]

When looking at the download redirects mentioned in comment #2 it looks like these are also causing a conflict with a redirect that includes 'download' in the URL.

Redirect permanent /download-mozilla.html http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Download_Mozilla_Source_Code

The http://www.mozilla.org/download-mozilla.html link goes to http://www.mozilla.org/projects/ instead of the page on MDC.

So based on these examples it looks like there are several things to test for:

* Are redirects pointing to non-existant pages?
* Are redirects being duplicated?
* Are redirects going to an existant page but not the one intended?

Comment 4

[David Boswell]

At a recent weekly update there was a mention of an automated redirect checker for mozilla.com.  Worth looking to see if it could help with this bug.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/WeeklyUpdates/2009-11-02#QA

Comment 5

[Kurt Seifried]

Did anything come of the "Wrote Mozilla.com automation tool to check redirects to landing pages for all the supported locales." on the weeklyupdates (i.e. can this bug be closed?). I was thinking of whipping a quick Python script together to address this, is there a list of url redirects somewhere?

Comment 6

[David Boswell]

I haven't heard any news about the automation tool, so moving forward a different way makes sense.

In terms of where the redirects live, there's one main .htaccess file and then a handful of others in different directories.  The main one is at

http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.org/trunk/.htaccess?view=log

Comment 7

[Andrei Hajdukewycz [:sancus]]

I've been using lwp-request to check redirects, it's a pretty handy little command that produces output like: 
[root@sancus ~]# lwp-request -m GET -edsS http://mozilla.org/thunderbird/
GET http://mozilla.org/thunderbird/ --> 301 Moved Permanently
GET http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird/ --> 302 Found
GET http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/ --> 200 OK

It's part of libwww-perl.

Comment 8

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Redirect tests have been in mcom-tests:
https://github.com/mozilla/mcom-tests/blob/master/tests/test_redirect.py

Comment 9

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

(In reply to Kohei Yoshino [:kohei] from comment #8)
> Redirect tests have been in mcom-tests:
> https://github.com/mozilla/mcom-tests/blob/master/tests/test_redirect.py

Thanks (again!)