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When your URL map changes, every millisecond spent in a 404 costs rankings, revenue, and trust. The Harper Redirector lets you manage millions of redirects with 1 millisecond P95 lookups—without bolting on a separate database, cache, or edge worker. Below is a quick technical tour so you can clone the repo and start stress‑testing it today.
Why a Dedicated Redirect Engine?
Scale
- Legacy approach: Apache/Nginx conf files grow linearly and reload slowly.
- Harper Redirector: Horizontally sharded tables; handling hundreds of millions of rules is routine.
Latency
- Legacy approach: Database lookups or client‑side JavaScript add extra round‑trips.
- Harper Redirector: In‑memory index inside the Harper runtime delivers sub‑millisecond lookups
Ops
- Legacy Approach: Redirects scattered across YAML files, CDN rules, and spreadsheets.
- Harper Redirector: One CSV/JSON import or REST write—fully versioned and promotable in bulk.
Under the Hood
- Smart matching – Host‑aware lookups, optional regex paths, and query‑string operations (
qs:preserve, qs:filter) so one rule can handle thousands of permutations - Versioning – Flip activeVersion in the
versiontable to atomically swap an entire redirect set—perfect for re‑platform launches.
Metrics out of the box – Every hit is written to a metrics stream; drop it into Grafana or the Harper Analytics API for real‑time insight.
3‑Step Local Spin‑Up
Requires the Harper CLI (npm i -g harperdb).
The harperdb dev . command will automatically watch for file changes within the component directory and restart the Harper threads when changes are detected.
Importing Rules
Fields include path, redirectURL, optional utcStartTime/EndTime, and regex flag. JSON is equally accepted.
Need a blue‑green cut‑over? Add version=1 to your CSV and promote it later:
Fast Lookup API
Returns {statusCode:301, redirectURL:"/sneakers"} from server in ~ 1ms. Parameters let you override host, version, or testing time, and you can push paths via the Path header to preserve query strings exactly.
Edge or Origin? You Choose
Because Harper runs identically on a single VM, a Kubernetes cluster, or geo‑distributed edge nodes, you can:
- Centralize at the origin for simple architectures.
- Fan‑out to edge instances (or have your CDN call the
/checkredirectAPI) for single‑digit‑ms global round‑trips.
Either way, scaling up is literally adding another Harper node—no extra services to wire.
Deploying to Dev, Staging, Prod
The CLI packages the repo (or pulls from npm/GitHub), ships it to the remote instance with rolling restarts for zero downtime.
Ready to Test It Yourself?
- Star & fork: https://github.com/HarperDB/template-redirector
- Browse the docs: https://docs.harperdb.io/docs/developers/components/managing
- Join us on Slack: https://harperdbcommunity.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1qr24rcth-29fwBYzHPXpgJdb9e~o24A#/shared-invite/email
The redirect problem is solved; now you can get back to building features. Happy routing!
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