Question

Sorry if this question was supposed to be in Server Vault. I couldn’t really tell whether it’s a programming error or a server configuration error.

I recently pushed my git commits to the live server and I noticed something very frustrating.

No matter how I edit the urls.py, I can’t seem to update RedirectView!

Here is my root mysite/urls.py

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^$', RedirectView.as_view(url=reverse_lazy('order_list')), name='home'),
    url(r'^doors/', include('doors.urls')),
    url(r'^accounts/', include('registration.urls')),
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^{}/'.format(settings.DAJAXICE_MEDIA_PREFIX), include('dajaxice.urls')),
)

The named URL order_list comes from one of my app’s urls.py

urlpatterns = patterns('doors.views',
    url(r'^order/$', OrderListView.as_view(), name='order_list'),
    # And more URL patterns...
)

So basically I simply changed r'^orders/$' to r'^order/$' in the last commit. But whenever I do {% url home %}, I noticed the server keeps trying to redirect to the old path of /doors/orders/ instead of /doors/order/. I also noticed that the redirect is a 301 Moved Permanently.

So I tried to add permenant=False to RedirectView and restarted the server. But it still goes to /doors/orders/ and the redirect is still 301 (it should have been 302)!

Why isn’t my RedirectView redirecting to the updated URL?

---

Server info

Running Apache 2.2.21 using mod_wsgi with Django 1.4 on Gentoo Linux

Answer 1

It turned out that the 301 redirections are cached on the browser!

So I cleared my browser’s cache and everything worked. It was hard knowing where to look for the error when I didn’t really understand the difference between 301 and 302 that well. I also realized that since my RedirectView is basically a placeholder until I write a real home template. I should be using permanent=False to always create a 302. Take a look at the docs for details.