How to access content *after* redirects are implemented

[Keith Gluck]

Hello. We are moving our help center soon, and as such, our URL will be redirected to the new site. I don't currently have access to Atlassian Support so I figured I'd try here. How will I be able to access all of my Confluence help documentation after the redirect? Is there a "backdoor URL" or something I could use? All of the help article URLs start with our domain followed by the article's title, so I'm not sure how to avoid being redirected when I want to access my Confluence data.

Thanks!

[Daniel Eads]

Hi Keith,

If I understand your question correctly, your Confluence instance's URL will be changing so that a page like this:

confluence.old-domain.com/wiki/page

to something like

confluence.new-thing.com/wiki/page

Is that how the rename you've mentioned is laid out?

If so, the typical way to handle this is to have a reverse proxy such as nginx or Apache listening on the previous URL. You can then use a wildcard permanent redirect rule to forward requests to the new, correct URL. A permanent redirect will tell search engines and browsers to use the new address (such as in the browser's autofill address bar) but it won't cause bookmarks or saved links to automatically update. You would need to leave the redirect in place until no new traffic is coming through it.

In nginx, a redirect can be as simple as this in a server block:

server {
server_name confluence.old-domain.com;
rewrite ^/(.*)$ http://confluence.new-domain.com/$1 permanent;
}

This matches any request to the old URL and redirects it to the corresponding path at the new URL.

Hope that helps explain a bit, and let me know if I've misunderstood!

Cheers,
Daniel