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Domain Redirects and Forwards#

Redirect a Domain to a Drupal Page#

Redirect a Domain to a Site Hosted on Pantheon (Drupal or WordPress)#

This is how NPL handles most domain names, after the .gov executive order in 2005.

Add an owned domain name to Pantheon:

  1. Log in to Pantheon: https://dashboard.pantheon.io/login

  2. Go to the Sites list in the left menu.

  3. Select the correct site where the domain name will point.

  4. On the site dashboard, click the Live tab.

  5. In the Live tab, click the Domains/HTTPS option in the left menu.

  6. Click the "connect domain" button.

  7. Enter domain to connect and click the "connect domain" button.

  8. Leave the "update method" option alone -- it will be set to Update DNS.

  9. You'll see a heading for "add the following DNS TXT record" followed by Name/Host and Value settings. Email those settings to ITS.

    Helpdesk,  
NPL needs to add a domain to our web host. Can you please add the following DNS TXT record to [domain name] with these settings?  
Name / Host - [value provided by Pantheon]  
Value - [value provided by Pantheon]

  10. After ITS adds the DNS TXT record, return to the Domains/HTTPS page for the site on Pantheon. Click the "verify ownership" button for that domain. Pantheon will provision an security certificate for the domain and the domain will point to the site's primary domain.

Forward a Domain to Internal Page on Drupal#

We generally do not forward domains to sub-pages on the NPL site. ITS requested that we phase out that practice in 2025. For the few domains that are still forwarded, this is how we set them up.

  1. Currently: ITS forwards the domain to the internal page (for example, https://library.nashville.org/studionpl) via Hover. Hover cannot forward https URLs. As of October 2025, browsers will still forward http URLs, but this may change.

  2. Previously: Drupal has a way to forward domains to a page using a few lines of code in settings.php. That code routes traffic from the domain name to a specific page on the Drupal site. We did this before our move to .gov. After our move to .gov, we cannot do this anymore. Setting our primary domain to .gov in Pantheon prevents any redirects in teh settings.php file from working.

How to set up a domain forward with ITS:

  1. Purchase the domain through ITS. If a domain is already owned, but not managed by Metro ITS, transfer the domain to Metro.

  2. Send ITS with a DNS service request with the associated domains and the IP address you want them sent to.

Hi Help Desk,

Nashville Public Library owns the following domain name(s):
[domain name]  

Can you please set up this domain forward in Hover?  

We need to forward traffic from the above domain name(s)
to library.nashville.org/[url-path].

If the DNS change is successful, a user typing [domain name] will be
redirected to library.nashville.org/[url-path].

Can you help?

Thanks,
  1. Test to verify that the redirect works.
    1. If you run into trouble, double check that there aren’t any redirects in Drupal that need to be deleted or changed.
    2. If there aren’t conflicting redirects in Drupal, report issues to ITS.