Since this just bit me in the butt - for the second time - I figured I'd do a real quick blog post. This isn't to help me remember, but to ensure it comes up next time I google for it.

I was working on a local 11ty site with the Netlify CLI dev command. For folks who don't know, this lets you simulate the Netlify environment locally. While a great tool, you sometimes run into issues where things behave differently locally compared to production.

For me, I ran into just such an issue Saturday morning. I had set up a simple _redirects file to support giving my serverless functions a nicer, and simpler, path:

/api/*	/.netlify/functions/:splat	200

This worked locally just fine, but in production, I kept getting a 404. Also, when I looked at my deploy log, I saw a message stating that no redirect rules were processed. On a whim, I duplicated my redirect in my netlify.toml file, deployed, and it woked fine.

I posted on the Netlify forums, and after some back and forth, a Netlify support person asked if my _redirects file was in the published directory. I'm using Eleventy and for non-supported files, you need to tell it to explicitly copy the file to output. This is done with one simple command (I'm sharing a few just to give you more examples):

eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("css");
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("js");
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("images");
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("fonts");
eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("_redirects");

As soon as I did that, and deployed, it worked perfectly. I do find it odd that a netlify.toml file in the root of my project works fine, even though it's not copied to output, but _redirects has to be copied for it to work. I think it should be consistent.

Anyway - as I said - this hit me twice now so hopefully I won't forget.

Photo by Jamie Templeton on Unsplash