In this video, I’ll show you how to deploy lilredirector, my open-source redirect engine built for Cloudflare Workers.

After six months of testing different architectures, it’s finally ready to deploy on your sites!

I’ve been working on lilredirector for about seven months, and it’s gone through a number of architecture redesigns and improvements. Originally, it was built with Workers KV, Cloudflare Workers’ distributed key-value store. It worked great as a proof-of-concept, but it made setup more complicated (you need to know how to set up a Workers KV namespace to even do one redirect), and, like all distributed systems, it had consistency issues. Redirects could take up to a minute to show up on your local Cloudflare edge server (the server closest to you, running your Workers function), and it led to a general sense of redirects feeling finicky.

The new version uses plain JavaScript to store redirects. It also uses a URL parser to handle dynamic parameters, so you can do things like redirect /blog/:post_id to /:post_id by matching parameters between the two fields.

This video is a culmination of that work, showing you how to add lilredirector to an existing site in just a few minutes. I use lilredirector everywhere: it’s a really useful tool to overlay on pretty much any site, because it passes through to your existing origin (the server your code runs on) if no redirect is found. If a redirect is found, it handles it without ever touching your origin, so in that sense, it’s a sort of “low-config” approach to doing redirects on your site without adding a complicated layer on top. It’s just JavaScript (you could probably build it yourself in a few hours), but with some nice configs and URL handling, battle-tested on my own sites and on the Cloudflare Developers documentation that I’ve helped maintain for the past couple years.

Find lilredirector on GitHub: codewithkristian/lilredirector.