Gatsby Client-Side External Redirect

We had a case where we needed to set up a redirect on the client side of Gatsby but we didn’t want to spin up a lambda to handle this one case. A redirect like this wouldn’t be a problem with some of the hosts out there, but we’re just using s3 and Cloudfront for this site.

To set up a quick redirect on the client we can send a redirect link through page context and handle the window location in a useEffect.

 {
    path: "/path",
    component: resolve(__dirname, "../src/templates/EmptyPage.tsx"),
    context: {
        redirectTo:
            "https://someawesomewebsite.com/newLink",
    },
},

import React, { useEffect } from "react";

function isClient() {
  return typeof window === "object";
}

export default function EmptyPage({ pageContext }) {
  useEffect(() => {
    if (isClient() && pageContext?.redirectTo) {
      window.location.href = pageContext.redirectTo;
    }
  }, []);

  return <div />;
}