Change a slug and create redirect in Whitehall
Change a slug and create a redirect in Whitehall
In Whitehall, we have Rake Tasks to change slugs and create redirects for
various entities: Person, Role, Document, PolicyGroup, WorldLocation,
Organisation, WorldwideOrganisation and StatisticsAnnoucement.
Rake Tasks
These Rake Tasks also reindex the entity with its new slug and republish it to Publishing API, which automatically handles the redirect. They all take the old slug and the new slug as arguments.
If you have not accessed the EKS before you will need to follow the set up guide first.
To run a Rake task you need to:
- set your region and context as below, specifying the appropriate environment name (integration, staging, production)
- use an AWS role that has the necessary permissions (poweruser or administrator)
export AWS_REGION=eu-west-1
eval $(gds aws govuk-integration-developer -e --art 8h)
kubectl config use-context <your-context-name>
To change slug and create redirect for a Person use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:person[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a Role use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:role[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a Document:
Visit the following URL, replacing <edition_id> with the ID of any of a documents editions:
https://whitehall-admin.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/admin/editions/<edition_id>/edit_slug
To change slug and create redirect for a PolicyGroup use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:policy_group[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a WorldLocation use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:world_location[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a Organisation use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:organisation[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a WorldwideOrganisation use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:worldwide_organisation[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
To change slug and create redirect for a StatisticsAnnoucement use:
kubectl exec -n apps deploy/whitehall-admin -- rake 'reslug:statistics_annoucement[OLD_SLUG,NEW_SLUG]'
Issues
If you run a task and find the redirect has worked but the new location returns a 404, it’s likely because the republish command is languishing in the low-priority queue (check queue volumes in Grafana). Whitehall appears to put the redirect in the low-priority queue, so there can be a delay between the redirect being applied and the content being republished.
This should resolve itself over time, but if you need to process the content
change more quickly, run represent_downstream:high_priority:content_id[CONTENT_ID]
to put it in the high priority queue,