Question

I recently upgraded a site and almost all URLs have changed. I have redirected all of them (or so I hope) but it may be possible that some of them have slipped by me. Is there a way to somehow catch all invalid URLs and send the user to a certain page and somehow know what URL the person came from so I could log this, and fix those? I’m thinking I could use .htaccess somehow but am not sure how. I am using PHP Thanks so much!

Answer 1

You could use a custom ErrorDocument handler written in PHP to catch URLs having “slipped by”:

# .htaccess file
ErrorDocument 404 /not-found.php

And in not-found.php:

switch($_SERVER['REDIRECT_URL']) {
    case '/really_old_page.php':
        header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
        header('Location: /new-url/...');
    /*  As suggested in the comment, exit here.
        Additional output might not be handled well and
        provokes undefined behavior. */
        exit;
    default:
        header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found');
        die('404 - Not Found');
}