Sitecore: Returning a 404 response on the page requested rather than redirecting to a 404 page

Previously I’ve blogged about:

• Creating a custom 404 page in Sitecore
• Updating the response headers on your 404 page in Sitecore

but while looking through the posts today, I realised I had never written about how you stop Sitecore from issuing 302 redirects to your 404 page and instead return a 404 on the URL requested with the contents of the 404 page.

While search engines will recognise a 302 response to a 404 as a 404 (in fact they’re intelligent enough to work out that a 404 page without a correct response status code is a 404) it’s considered SEO best practice for the URL to stay the same and to issue the correct status code.

Creating a NotFoundResolver class

When Sitecore processes a request it will run the httpRequestBegin pipeline, and within that pipeline is a Item Resolver processor that will attempt to find the requested item. If after this the context item is still null then the logic to redirect to the ItemNotFoundUrl will kick in. To stop this happening we can simply add our own process to the pipeline after ItemResolver and set the item.

Our class looks like this:

using Sitecore;
using Sitecore.Configuration;
using Sitecore.Data;
using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest;

namespace Pipelines.HttpRequest
{
    public class NotFoundResolver : HttpRequestProcessor
    {
        private static readonly string PageNotFoundID = Settings.GetSetting("PageNotFound");

        public override void Process(HttpRequestArgs args)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, nameof(args));

            if ((Context.Item != null) || (Context.Database == null))
                return;

            if (args.Url.FilePath.StartsWith("/~/"))
                return;

            var notFoundPage = Context.Database.GetItem(new ID(PageNotFoundID));
            if (notFoundPage == null)
                return;

            args.ProcessorItem = notFoundPage;
            Context.Item = notFoundPage;
        }
    }
}

To add our process to the pipeline we can use a patch file like this:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <pipelines>
      <httpRequestBegin>
        <processor
          patch:after="processor[@type='Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.ItemResolver, Sitecore.Kernel']"
          type="LabSitecore.Core.Pipelines.NotFoundResolver, LabSitecore.Core"  />
      </httpRequestBegin>
    </pipelines>
    <settings>
      <!-- Page Not Found Item Id -->
      <setting name="PageNotFound" value="ID OF YOUR 404 PAGE" />
    </settings>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Notice the setting for the ID of your 404 page to be loaded as the content.

Remember if you do do this make sure you also follow one of the methods to return a 404 status code, otherwise you will have just made every URL a valid 200 response on your site.

Setting up local https with IIS in 10 minutes

For very good reasons websites now nearly always run under https rather than http. As dev’s though this gives us a complication of either removing any local redirect to https rules and “hoping” things work ok when we get to a server, or setting local IIS up to have an https binding.

Having https setup locally is obviously a lot more favourable and what has traditionally been done is to create a self signed certificate however while this works as far as IIS is concerned, it still leaves an annoying browser warning as the browser will recognise it as un-secure. This can then create additional problems in client side code when certain things will hit the error when calling an api.

mkcert

The solution is to have a certificate added to your trusted root certificates rather than a self signed one. Fortunately there is a tool called mkcert that makes the process a lot simpler to do.

https://github.com/FiloSottile/mkcert#windows

Create a local cert step by step

1. If you haven’t already. Install chocolatey ( https://chocolatey.org/install ). Chocolatey is a package manager for windows which makes it super simple to install applications. The name is inspired from NuGet. i.e. Chocolatey Nuget

2. Install mkcert, to do this from a admin command window run

choco install mkcert

3. Create a local certificate authority (ca)

mkcert -install

4. Create a certificate

mkcert -pkcs12 example.com

Remember to change example.com to the domain you would like to create a certificate for.

5. Rename the .p12 file that was created to .pfx (this is what IIS requires). The certificate will now be created in the folder you have the command window open at.

You can now import the certificate into IIS as normal. When asked for a password this have been set to changeit