Fix Python – Django URL Redirect

Question 1

How can I redirect traffic that doesn’t match any of my other URLs back to the home page?

urls.py:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', 'macmonster.views.home'),
    #url(r'^macmon_home$', 'macmonster.views.home'),
    url(r'^macmon_output/$', 'macmonster.views.output'),
    url(r'^macmon_about/$', 'macmonster.views.about'),
    url(r'^.*$',  'macmonster.views.home'),
)

As it stands, the last entry sends all “other” traffic to the home page but I want to redirect via either an HTTP 301 or 302.

Question 2

You can try the Class Based View called RedirectView

from django.views.generic.base import RedirectView

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', 'macmonster.views.home'),
    #url(r'^macmon_home$', 'macmonster.views.home'),
    url(r'^macmon_output/$', 'macmonster.views.output'),
    url(r'^macmon_about/$', 'macmonster.views.about'),
    url(r'^.*$', RedirectView.as_view(url='<url_to_home_view>', permanent=False), name='index')
)

Notice how as url in the <url_to_home_view> you need to actually specify the url.

permanent=False will return HTTP 302, while permanent=True will return HTTP 301.

Alternatively you can use django.shortcuts.redirect

Update for Django 2+ versions

With Django 2+, url() is deprecated and replaced by re_path(). Usage is exactly the same as url() with regular expressions. For replacements without the need of regular expression, use path().

from django.urls import re_path

re_path(r'^.*$', RedirectView.as_view(url='<url_to_home_view>', permanent=False), name='index')

Question

Answer