Spike: Test alternative redirect strategies

We'll need a better method for redirects before launching.

Two major changes happen with URLs when we move to Hugo:

  1. We're dropping the ee prefix for pages from gitlab. This can be handled with a standard GitLab Pages redirect.

  2. Hugo generates paths slightly differently than Nanoc. We can configure this in one of two ways:

    PrettyURLs: Pages no longer have an .html suffix, so we would need redirects for URLs that end in .html, like https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/release_your_application.html.

    UglyURLs: All pages would have an .html suffix, so we would need redirects for URLs like https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/

It does not appear to be possible to handle either of the .html redirect scenarios with GitLab Pages (see #88 (comment 2021002520)), so we'll probably need to either:

  1. Use something like Cloudflare
  2. Use JavaScript redirects (bad UX, bad SEO)
  3. Host elsewhere (too much maintenance overhead, too much change)

At this time I think it may be best to switch back to prettyURLs and use Cloudflare, but this will take some research (who owns this service, how would pricing work, how will we manage it, etc).

It looks like a few other GitLab sites do use Cloudflare for redirects already:

Edited by Sarah German