distantnative/retour-for-kirby 6.0.0-beta.1

on GitHub

Retour 6 is rebuilt for Kirby 6: less noise from bots and scanners, a faster and leaner log, a Panel that's easier to navigate and more robust redirects. If you're on Kirby 4 or 5, keep using Retour 5.7.

Breaking changes

Updating is mostly automatic, but a few things work differently now. Check them first, especially if you want to keep log entries older than a year:

• Requires Kirby 6 and PHP 8.3 or newer
• kirby retour:indices command has been removed. Logs of earlier versions are updated automatically the first time you open Retour in the Panel.
• Log entries older than 12 months are deleted automatically (deleteAfter defaults to 12; set it to false to keep them)
• The PHP API has changed significantly. If your code uses Retour's classes directly, check it against the new version.

Features

On most sites, the majority of 404s don't come from people but from bots probing for WordPress logins or leaked .env files. Retour 6 lets you silence them right from the Panel and makes everything else easier to explore:

• Ignore failures from the Panel by their path/pattern. The "Ignored" button manages these paths and adds common scanner paths (wp-*, xmlrpc.php, .env, …) in one go.
• New ignoreIps option keeps IP addresses or ranges out of the log.
• Stats get a "Week" timespan, arrow keys to step through timespans and an updated design for the pie chart.
• Tables keep their page, sorting and filter in the URL and show 50 rows per page.
• New cache option: the parsed redirects config is cached until the file changes (on by default)
• Multi-language sites: redirects to pages can target a specific language
• New Czech, Danish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal) and Spanish (Latin America) translations
• More fitting icons

Performance

Retour looks at every request your site answers, and its log grows with every bot that passes by. Both had to get a lot leaner:

• Panel, API and media requests no longer load the redirects at all
• With 1M log records, the log takes 88 MB instead of 133 MB, and removing, resolving or ignoring failures takes 0.1 ms instead of 47 ms thanks to a new index
• Tables are paginated, sorted and filtered on the server: at 1M log records, two years of failures load 4 KB instead of 30 MB of data and no longer exceed PHP's memory limit

Fixes

Rebuilding Retour meant looking into every corner, and quite a few long-standing bugs turned up along the way:

• retour.yml that can't be parsed is no longer replaced with an empty list.
• Saving rejects invalid path patterns, status codes and duplicate paths.
• Redirects answer HEAD requests (without logging them) and pass query strings on unchanged.
• Missing targets show the error page and are logged as failure.
• Multi-language sites: redirects with priority keep visitors in the language of the path.
• Logging: one invalid ignore pattern no longer breaks the others and removing a failure keeps the redirect hits of its path
• Stats: custom timespans show every month, count only their own records and move by their own length.
• Timeline marks the current time by the server's clock and handles daylight saving time.
• Fixes for right-to-left languages and narrow screens.
• Tables: failures/redirects with slashes, ~, !, * or ' in the path can be managed.
• Filtering, sorting and pagination are more reliable.
• Numbers and dates follow the Panel's language.

Housekeeping

Behind the scenes, Retour got easier to test, translate and contribute to:

• New kirby retour:seed command that fills the log with dummy data for testing
• Translations moved from Transifex to pull requests against src/i18n on the dev branch
• Upgraded tooling and a much larger test suite

Installation

Retour 6 is a beta, so try it on a test site first. Make sure you have a backup of your Retour config file. The first time you open it in the Panel, it updates the log database, so keep a backup of site/logs/retour/log.sqlite if you might go back to Retour 5.

Install the beta with Composer:

composer require distantnative/retour-for-kirby:^6.0@beta

Or download the zip below, rename the folder to retour and move it to site/plugins/retour.

Known issues

One thing still needs a fix in Kirby itself:

• With Kirby 6.0.0-beta.1, the Failures tab breaks when the selected timespan has no failures, and otherwise shows the wrong number of pages. The fix is in Kirby itself (getkirby/kirby#8670) and will work as soon as a Kirby release includes it (likely Kirby 6.0.0-beta.2).