Years ago I saw Jeff Starr of Perishable Press set up shortlinks for a book of his where URLs such as example/u/123 redirected to example?p=123. I thought that was a handy way to set up no-hassle shortlinks using the WordPress post id.

I can't find the snippet back and I'm not good with htaccess. Here's a relevant snippet I found that I'm trying, but it's returning 404s. Is this on the right track, how would you fix it?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/(\d+)$ /?p=$1 [R=302,L]

Years ago I saw Jeff Starr of Perishable Press set up shortlinks for a book of his where URLs such as example/u/123 redirected to example?p=123. I thought that was a handy way to set up no-hassle shortlinks using the WordPress post id.

I can't find the snippet back and I'm not good with htaccess. Here's a relevant snippet I found that I'm trying, but it's returning 404s. Is this on the right track, how would you fix it?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/(\d+)$ /?p=$1 [R=302,L]

• redirect
• htaccess
• apache
• shortlink

• 1 Sorry about the previous answer. What I said about the 404 is true.. except, I didn't realize I hadn't actually saved the updated .htaccess file. :p I've revised the answer and I hope it's still helpful... – Sally CJ Commented Jul 12, 2019 at 13:26

1 Answer 1

So I'm not sure why that RewriteRule returned a 404 error for you, because I've tested it and it did work as expected — if permalinks are actually enabled, you would be redirected to the actual post permalink.

And here's the content of my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/(\d+)$ /?p=$1 [R=302,L]

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I.e. I put the custom rewrite rule above the WordPress rewrite rules. That way, your custom rules would work and remain even when WordPress permalinks are updated.

Nonetheless, you could also use the parse_request to achieve the same results (i.e. redirection):

add_action( 'parse_request', function( $wp ){
    if ( preg_match( '#^go/(\d+)$#', $wp->request, $matches ) ) {
        if ( $matches[1] && get_post( $matches[1] ) ) {
            wp_redirect( get_permalink( $matches[1] ) );
            exit;
        }
    }
}, 0 );