Blender Redirector

Blender Redirector is a user-facing website which takes care of redirecting certain semantic entities to their final destination, allowing to hide specifics of the current configuration.

For example, it is possible to request the redirector to ask "please direct me to a Blender bug submission form", and the redirtector will take care of figuring out which final site the request should land on.

The practical issue this redirector solves is backward compatibility of older systems, so that changes to the Blender infrastructure does not break old assumptions.

Supported Redirects

All redirects supports an optional utm_source argument which is passed through via the redirect to the final destination.

• Redirect to a bug report submission: /?type=bug_report&project=<project>&os=<os>&gpu=<gpu>&broken_version=<broken_version>&addon_name=<addon_name>&addon_author=<addon_author>

  • project is one of blender or blender-addons. Any other value will redirect to the home page of the bug tracking system (currently https://projects.blender.org).
  • os, gpu, broken_version are the operating system, GPU, and full Blender version (including hash) of the system from which the report is being submitted.
  • addon_name and addon_author is the name of the addon and name of its author when bug report is about an addon.

Legacy redirects

Redirects which were put to support Blender versions prior to the redictor website.

• Redirect from Phabricator's maniphest submission form to the new submission form: /?type=maniphest_form?id=<form_id>&description=<description>

  • form_id is an identifier of a form. Values could be 1 for Blender bug, and 2 for blender-addons bug. Any other value will redirect to the home page of the bug tracking system (currently https://projects.blender.org).

  • description is a plain text description of the bug report, with some template fields pre-filled.

• Redirect from Phabricator's maniphest task it to the new system: /?type=maniphest_task?id=<id>

  • id is an identifier of the task ID. The redirector checks which project the report used to belong to, and does redirect to the corresponding issue in that project.

    If the given id is unknown then redirects happens to the home page of the bug tracking system (currently https://projects.blender.org).

Apache configuration

A simple example configuration to let local development up-and-running, and to simplify deployment to the final production. The assumption is that the repository is checked out to the /var/www/.

Configuration for the redirect.blender.org:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  Define PROJECT_DOCUMENT_ROOT /var/www/redirect-website/

  ServerName redirect.blender.org

  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  DocumentRoot ${PROJECT_DOCUMENT_ROOT}/webroot

  <Directory />
    DirectoryIndex index.php
    Require all granted
  </Directory>

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/robots.txt        -                               [L,QSA]
  RewriteRule ^/favicon.ico       -                               [L,QSA]
  RewriteRule ^(.*)(\?(.*))?$     /index.php?__path__=$1&$2       [B,L,QSA]

  ErrorLog ${PROJECT_DOCUMENT_ROOT}/logs/error.log
  CustomLog ${PROJECT_DOCUMENT_ROOT}/logs/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

Partial configuration for developer.blender.org:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerName developer.blender.org

  RewriteEngine on

  # Maniphest Tasks.
  RewriteRule    ^/T([0-9]+).*$                         https://redirect.blender.org/?type=maniphest_task&id=$1 [NE,L,QSA,R=307]

  # Report Blender or Addon bug.
  RewriteRule    ^/maniphest/task/edit/form/([0-9]+)    https://redirect.blender.org/?type=maniphest_form&id=$1 [NE,L,QSA,R=307]
</VirtualHost>

Testing

There is a very simplistic unit testing put in place, which does not require any extra dependencies. In order to run the test simply invoke php source/test_all.php.

Debugging

When an REDIRECT_DEBUG environment variable is set, or a get parameter with the same name exists the eredirector will enable debug prints to the output, and will not perform an actual redirection.

For example: REDIRECT_DEBUG=1 php ./source/tests_all.php.

License

The Blender Redirector is licensed under the terms of the MIT No Attribution.