xesite/blog/big-domain-move.markdown

title	date	tags
Site Update: The Big Domain Move To xeiaso.net	2022-05-28	dns

Hello all!

If you take a look in the URL bar of your browser (or on the article URL section of your feed reader), you should see that there is a new domain name! Welcome to xeiaso.net!

Hopefully nothing broke in the process of moving things over, I tried to make sure that everything would forward over and today I'm going to explain how I did that.

I have really good SEO on my NixOS articles, and for my blog in general. I did not want to risk tanking that SEO when I moved domain names, so I have been putting this off for the better part of a year. As for why now? I got tired of internets complaning that the URL was "christine dot website" when I wanted to be called "Xe". Now you have no excuse.

So the first step was to be sure that everything got forwarded over to the new domain. After buying the domain name and setting everything up in Cloudflare (including moving my paid plan over), I pointed the new domain at my server and then set up a new NixOS configuration block to have that domain name point to my site binary:

services.nginx.virtualHosts."xeiaso.net" = {
  locations."/" = {
    proxyPass = "http://unix:${toString cfg.sockPath}";
    proxyWebsockets = true;
  };
  forceSSL = cfg.useACME;
  useACMEHost = "xeiaso.net";
  extraConfig = ''
    access_log /var/log/nginx/xesite.access.log;
  '';
};

After that was working, I then got a list of all the things that probably shouldn't be redirected from. In most cases, most HTTP clients should do the right thing when getting a permanent redirect to a new URL. However, we live in a fallen world where we cannot expect clients to do the right thing. Especially RSS feed readers.

So I made a list of all the things that I was afraid to make permanent redirects for and here it is:

• /jsonfeed - a JSONFeed package for Go (docs), I didn't want to break builds by issuing a permanent redirect that would not match the go.mod file.
• /.within/health - the healthcheck route used by monitoring. I didn't want to find out if NodePing blew up on a 301.
• /.within/website.within.xesite/new_post - the URL used by the Android app widget to let you know when a new post is published. I didn't want to find out if Android's HTTP library handles redirects properly or not.
• /blog.rss - RSS feed readers are badly implemented. I didn't want to find out if it would break people's feeds entirely. I actually care about people that read this blog over RSS and I'm sad that poorly written feed readers punish this server so much.
• /blog.atom - See above.
• /blog.json - See above.

Now that I have the list of URLs to not forward, I can finally write the small bit of Nginx config that will set up permanent forwards (HTTP status code 301) for every link pointing to the old domain. It will look something like this:

location / {
  return 301 https://xeiaso.net$request_uri;
}

Note that it's using $request_uri and not just $uri. If you use $uri you run the risk of CRLF injection, which will allow any random attacker to inject HTTP headers into incoming requests. This is not a good thing to have happen, to say the least.

So I wrote a little bit of NixOS config that automatically bridges the gap:

services.nginx.virtualHosts."christine.website" = let proxyOld = {
    proxyPass = "http://unix:${toString cfg.sockPath}";
    proxyWebsockets = true;
  }; in {
  locations."/jsonfeed" = proxyOld;
  locations."/.within/health" = proxyOld;
  locations."/.within/website.within.xesite/new_post" = proxyOld;
  locations."/blog.rss" = proxyOld;
  locations."/blog.atom" = proxyOld;
  locations."/blog.json" = proxyOld;
  locations."/".extraConfig = ''
    return 301 https://xeiaso.net$request_uri;
  '';
  forceSSL = cfg.useACME;
  useACMEHost = "christine.website";
  extraConfig = ''
    access_log /var/log/nginx/xesite_old.access.log;
  '';
};

This will point all the scary paths to the site itself and have https://christine.website/whatever get forwarded to https://xeiaso.net/whatever, this makes sure that every single link that anyone has ever posted will get properly forwarded. This makes link rot literally impossible, and helps ensure that I keep my hard-earned SEO.

I also renamed my email address to me@xeiaso.net. Please update your address books and spam filters accordingly. Also update my name to Xe Iaso if you haven't already.

I've got some projects in the back burner that will make this blog even better! Stay tuned and stay frosty.

What was formerly known as the "christine dot website cinematic universe" is now known as the "xeiaso dot net cinematic universe".