ref: 9dab62c559d7665ef1968f0ceba58704a5a29dde
dir: /docs/content/extras/aliases.md/
---
aliases:
- /doc/redirects/
- /doc/alias/
- /doc/aliases/
lastmod: 2015-12-23
date: 2013-07-09
menu:
main:
parent: extras
next: /extras/analytics
prev: /taxonomies/ordering
title: Aliases
weight: 10
---
For people migrating existing published content to Hugo, there's a good chance you need a mechanism to handle redirecting old URLs.
Luckily, redirects can be handled easily with _aliases_ in Hugo.
## Example
Given a post on your current Hugo site, with a path of:
``content/posts/my-awesome-blog-post.md``
... you create an "aliases" section in the frontmatter of your post, and add previous paths to that.
### TOML frontmatter
```toml
+++
...
aliases = [
"/posts/my-original-url/",
"/2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html"
]
...
+++
```
### YAML frontmatter
```yaml
---
...
aliases:
- /posts/my-original-url/
- /2010/01/01/even-earlier-url.html
...
---
```
Now when you visit any of the locations specified in aliases, _assuming the same site domain_, you'll be redirected to the page they are specified on.
## Important Behaviors
1. *Hugo makes no assumptions about aliases. They also don't change based
on your UglyURLs setting. You need to provide absolute path to your webroot
and the complete filename or directory.*
2. *Aliases are rendered prior to any content and will be overwritten by
any content with the same location.*
## How Hugo Aliases Work
When aliases are specified, Hugo creates a physical folder structure to match the alias entry, and, an html file specifying the canonical URL for the page, and a redirect target.
Assuming a baseurl of `mysite.tld`, the contents of the html file will look something like:
```html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>http://mysite.tld/posts/my-original-url</title>
<link rel="canonical" href="http://mysite.tld/posts/my-original-url"/>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://mysite.tld/posts/my-original-url"/>
</head>
</html>
```
The `http-equiv="refresh"` line is what performs the redirect, in 0 seconds in this case.