Alias Redirects

This experiment gives an old URL a small redirect document while leaving the canonical article as a normal Quartz page. The legacy route is deliberately a noindex/meta-refresh stub, not a second copy of the article; its existence must not be mistaken for full-content rendering.

The following contiguous configuration excerpt is copied from /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/engine/quartz.config.yaml, lines 135–139:

  - source: "@quartz-community/alias-redirects"
    enabled: true
    options:
      enableCaseRedirects: true
    order: 50

The actual fixture frontmatter, including its alias, is copied from /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/vault/experiments/alias-redirects.md, lines 1–10:

---
title: Alias Redirects
description: "A canonical page with a frontmatter alias that emits a noindex meta-refresh HTML redirect at the old route."
tags:
  - sandbox
  - experiment
  - emitter
aliases:
  - alias-redirects-old
---

What the rendered output proves

These are prior-capture results from /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/evidence/2026-09-15-quartz-migration-f1fd35c3/sandbox-experiments.json, not a new browser run by this page’s author. The receipt captured the built release dist-1789511778 through a temporary loopback static server. The corresponding live canonical URL is https://quartz.loca.zone/experiments/alias-redirects.html.

• rendered_proof.routes records the canonical page title Alias Redirects — Quartz Sandbox, bytes: 37418, and markers reading_stats: 1, reading_words: "219", reading_minutes: "1". These show an ordinary rendered article, not proof of a redirect interaction.
• artifacts["alias-redirects-old.html"] records bytes: 299, title: "experiments/alias-redirects", canonical: "./experiments/alias-redirects", robots: "noindex", and refresh: "0; url=./experiments/alias-redirects". Its corresponding live URL is https://quartz.loca.zone/alias-redirects-old.html.
• The classified experiment’s artifact_markers records refresh: true and manifest_entry: false. The manifest has entries: 44 and includes_alias_redirect: false; the sitemap and RSS also record includes_alias_redirect: false.

The old route is therefore an intentional emitted redirect-only artifact. A successful HTTP response there would not establish that the article body was served. The receipt proves the redirect instructions exist, not that a browser followed them in an interaction test. Likewise, enableCaseRedirects: true is observed configuration, not an independently demonstrated mixed-case navigation result. noindex is a crawler directive, not access control.

An independent public-route check on 2026-09-16 fetched both canonical and alias routes with HTTP 200. The extensionless alias https://quartz.loca.zone/alias-redirects-old returned the same 299-byte stub, with robots: noindex, refresh: 0; url=./experiments/alias-redirects and canonical ./experiments/alias-redirects. A fresh-profile Chrome capture of that alias, using --virtual-time-budget=15000, exited 0 and returned the destination article title Alias Redirects — Quartz Sandbox, one reading-statistics badge with data-words="219" and data-minutes="1", and 37,402 DOM bytes. That observes the browser following this particular meta-refresh; it still does not test every alias or mixed-case path. DOM SHA-256: b542146303b0653e52c8af5494706838a11fb0ff5e858c6e3f461cfe283e0e5f.

Safe for the shared engine?

Recorded classification: safe_for_shared_engine: true.

Receipt reason, verbatim:

The additive redirect emitter preserves old URLs without changing the canonical page or requiring a runtime service.

This is a recorded assessment, not deployment authority. A true verdict does NOT authorize a shared-engine change: report any such requirement as a BLOCKER, not an action. The shared engine serving 51 wikis remains outside this sandbox experiment’s mutation scope.

Try it in the sandbox

The rebuild command is provided for an authorized sandbox operator; it was not run while authoring this page:

cd /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox && ./build.sh

The actual wrapper /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/build.sh pins the isolated engine to commit 3dff48b5df6d84c9544a5ae19c8f2cbb01dc44e5 and refuses an engine outside the project. A commit mismatch fails unless the explicit SANDBOX_ALLOW_DRIFT=1 override is used; that override does not remove the isolation fence. A nonblocking .build.lock serializes wrapper builds. It runs install-plugins BEFORE bootstrap-cli.mjs build, using --directory with /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/vault by default and --output with a fresh timestamped /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/dist-<epoch> directory. It checks for index.html before atomically swapping current. The origin sees the new release on the next request without a restart, as the prior sandbox-runtime.json hot-swap receipt demonstrated.

Recorded runtime invocation, reference only:

PATH=/usr/bin:/bin PORT=51947 SANDBOX_ROOT=/home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/current NODE_ENV=production /usr/bin/node /home/loca/dev/quartz-sandbox/sandbox/serve.mjs

The production service already owns port 51947. Do NOT start a second process or restart the service. The runtime receipt describes an earlier supervised proof process; it is not an instruction to recreate that process beside production.

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