Today at Switchn we had the need to redirect users by country and browser language on our Netlify hosted site. That is, send those visiting our site from English speaking countries to /en/ and those from French speaking countries to /fr/. Also if the user’s browser sends an accept-language header in the request (e.g. accept-language: en-US,en;q=0.9), we’d like to take that into consideration too.
I had the thought, isn’t it possible the awesome engineers at Netlify have thought of this use case for their customers? Well, surprise!! They have.
Netlify Support links
Here’s an example _redirects file configuration:
# Redirect API requests to your API server
/api/* https://api.your-domain-name.com/:splat
# Redirect users with English language (browser) preference to the English site
/* /en/index.html 200 Language=en
# Redirect users with french language (browser) preference to the french site
/* /fr/index.html 302 Language=fr
# If browser-specific language preference is not available,
# redirect by default to the English site
/* /en/index.html 200
Please note I’ve not tested the above configuration with a live site, I might later add a section with the configuration we end up using.