Best way to handle legacy urls in django - django

Question

I am working on a big news publishing platform. Basically rebuilding everything from ground zero with django. Now as we are almost ready for the launch I need to handle legacy url redirects. What is the best way to do it having in mind that I have to deal with tenths of thousands of legacy urls?
Logic should work like this: If none of existing urls/views where matched run that url thorough legacy Redirect urls patterns/views to see if it can provide some redirect to the new url before returning 404 error.
How do I do that?

Answer 1

You may want to create a fallback view that will try to handle any url not handled by your patterns. I see two options.
Just create a "default" pattern. It's important to this pattern to
be the last within your urlpatterns!
in your urls.py:
urlpatterns = patterns(
'',
# all your patterns
url(r'^.+/', 'app.views.fallback')
)
in your views.py:
from django.http.response import HttpResponseRedirect, Http404
def fallback(request):
if is_legacy(request.path):
return HttpResponseRedirect(convert(request.path))
raise Http404
Create a custom http 404 handler.
in your urls.py:
handler404 = 'app.views.fallback'
in your views.py
from django.http.response import HttpResponseRedirect
from django.views.defaults import page_not_found
def fallback(request):
if is_legacy(request.path):
return HttpResponseRedirect(convert(request.path))
return page_not_found(request)
it may seem to be a nicer solution but it will only work if you set DEBUG setting to False and provide custom 404 template.

Answer 2

Awesome, achieved that by using custom middleware:
from django.http import Http404
from legacy.urls import urlpatterns
class LegacyURLsMiddleware(object):
def process_response(self, request, response):
if response.status_code != 404:
return response
for resolver in urlpatterns:
try:
match = resolver.resolve(request.path[1:])
if match:
return match.func(request, *match.args, **match.kwargs)
except Http404:
pass
return response
Simply add this middleware as a last middleware in MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES list. Then use urls.py file in your legacy app to declare legacy urls and views which will handle permanent redirects. DO NOT include your legacy urls in to main urls structure. This middleware does it for you, but in a bit different way.

Answer 3

Use the Jacobian's django-multiurl. There is a django ticket to address the issue someday, but for now django-multiurl works very good.
Before:
# urls.py
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.people),
url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.place), # <-- Never matches
)
After:
# urls.py
from multiurl import multiurl, ContinueResolving
from django.http import Http404
urlpatterns = patterns('', multiurl(
url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.people), # <-- Tried 1st
url('/app/(\w+)/$', app.views.place), # <-- Tried 2nd (only if 1st raised Http404)
catch=(Http404, ContinueResolving)
))