About#

re:Director lets you create redirects through a simple web interface. All you have to do is define which url should be redirected to which target. Just make sure the that the actual domain points to re:Director. It’s an open-source (Apache License 2.0) and self-hostable alternative to many SaaS solutions out there.

Why I built this#

I was self hosting my applications behind Traefik reverse proxy and defined the redirects in there. My Docker Compose file got longer and longer to the point where it was barely readable at all. Also the process of editing it was cumbersome: SSHing into the machine, editing the file with Vim and restarting the service. I also tried out different URL shorteners, but they were either difficult to set up or where doing so many more things.

I wanted something simpler to manage my redirects, with a Web UI. I am a developer by day, so I just wrote one myself.

Use-Cases#

I am not good at remembering long paths, ports or similar. So this tool makes it a lot easier for me to remember URLs by giving them a shorter alternative.

Instead of typing http://pihole/admin I just type adblock.internal.
Instead of typing https://unifi:11443 I just type unifi.internal.
Instead of typing http://plex:32400/web/index.html#! I just type plex.internal.
re:Director will then redirect me to the longer URL.

As you see it helps with URLs that contain ports, long paths, query parameters or any other things that you might find in a URL.