Redirecting blog URL without date in Firebase Hosting

When I was hosting this blog in my own VPS, I followed the URL pattern of "/blog/yyyy/mm/blog-post", which worked quite well for my setup. But I decided to switch to a simpler URL pattern when I moved my blog to Firebase hosting.

I did not want the date part in the URL. Specifically, I wanted to host my blog pages under a simple URL of "/blog/blog-post/".

It turns out that setting up this redirect is quite simple in Firebase. All I needed was to define the redirect rule in the firebase.json file and I am all set.

Firebase hosting redirect rule to remove date from blog post URL

{
  "hosting": {

    ... other configuration,

    "redirects": [
      {
        "regex": "/blog/\\d{4}/\\d{2}/(?P<post>.+)/",
        "destination": "/blog/:post",
        "type": 301
      }
    ]
  }
}

And that'd be it. This saved me from lots of 404s that I was seeing in my blog lately.