Add 301 Redirects to a Drupal Migration

By Kevin , July 2nd, 2014

Migrating content from one platform to another saves lots of time from doing grunt work and gets data moved fast. However, simply moving the content doesn’t mean the job is done. There are other considerations too, such as 301 redirects for example. Since we are moving content, our aliases are likely changing too. We can create 301s while migrating content in all at once.

The way I like to do it is to place the following in my Migration class complete() method:


public function complete($node, stdClass $row) {
  // Create an object with our redirect parameters
  $redirect = new stdClass();
  redirect_object_prepare($redirect);
  $redirect->source = date('Y', $row->post_date) . '/' . date('m', $row->post_date) . '/' . $row->post_name; // Old URL
  $redirect->source_options = array();
  $redirect->redirect = 'node/' . $node->nid; // New system path
  $redirect->redirect_options = array();
  $redirect->type = 'redirect';
  $redirect->language = LANGUAGE_NONE;

  $alias = db_query('SELECT alias FROM {url_alias} WHERE source = :src_path', array(':src_path' => 'node/'. $node->nid))->fetchField();

  // Create the redirect, if it does not exist already
  if ($alias && $alias != $redirect->source) {
    redirect_save($redirect);
  }
}

At the end, we only create the redirect if the alias didn’t previously exist, so we can avoid nightmarish redirect loops.

I also like to go a step further - I usually have a parent Migration class that I inherit from that contains lots of convenient helpers; creating redirects is one of those helpers. In that case, your parent class would have a method called generateNodeRedirect() with the same arguments as the complete() method. Then, any complete method in any number of node Migration classes then becomes:


public function complete($node, stdClass $row) {
  parent::generateNodeRedirect($node, $row);
}

Keeping utility functions in a parent class you extend from keeps it located all in one place so you aren’t repeating yourself (DRY!). You can repeat this pattern for users, taxonomies and custom entities too, just change the values being set.

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