Redirect a filename in Netlify without specifying the path

Posted 26th June 2020 in Development and Serverless

I check my Netlify Analytics every now and again to see what pages people are looking for but not finding, so that I can fix things with redirect in my netlify.toml file.

Most of the human redirects have been fixed, so it’s all just spambots now, looking for /wp-login.php or .env; none of which exist on my server. The latest bot has been looking for a wlwmanifest.xml, and it’s really going for it! So much so that it has taken over 14 of my 15 slots in my Netlify Analytics dashboard, so I can’t see much. I see the following (double initial forward slashes sic):

  • //wp1/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //wp2/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //test/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //website/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //wp/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //web/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //cms/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //wordpress/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //sito/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //site/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //blog/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml
  • //2018/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml

I didn’t fancy adding 14 redirects to my already lengthy netlify.toml file, so I had a search for some way of targeting any wlwmanifest.xml file, regardless of the directory it’s in. Nothing. Not a bean.

But I did some testing on a staging server and worked it out. Here’s how:

[[redirects]]
  from = "*/wlwmanifest.xml"
  to = "/404"
  status = 301
  force = true

All you need is an asterisk before the forward slash, and it will redirect any request for that file, regardless of the directory it’s being looked for in.

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