Discussion on "Why Cloudflare Pages Stopped Reading My _redirects at About 120 Rules"

Katia Belokon · 2026-10-27T09:45:54.386Z

TL;DR: On Cloudflare Pages, my _redirects file worked for roughly its first 120 rules. Everything after that returned 404, and 8 of my redirects stayed broken for two months. The docs promise 2,000 st

The distinction between a matching explanation and a confirmed cause is helpful here. Have you tried the same small test file on a preview deploy to compare its cutoff with the local result?

Thanks, Abhinav. No, I haven't, and that's the open gap in the post. The ~120 cutoff was on production, and the reproduction only ran locally in wrangler pages dev. So the post shows a mechanism that fits, not proof that production uses the same parser. A preview deploy of the same synthetic file would answer that, and if you or anyone else tries it, I'd be glad to hear the result.

The positional classification detail is the interesting part: one early splat silently demotes every later rule into the 100-slot dynamic budget. A suggestion for the CI check: besides counting rules, also assert that every static rule precedes the first dynamic one, so reordering is enforced rather than remembered. A related question is whether a silent skip could be surfaced at build time, for example by diffing the parsed rule count against the line count in the deploy log. For the post-deploy curl check, it may also be worth asserting the Location header and status, since a rule that falls through to a catch-all 200 SPA fallback would not look like a 404 but would still be wrong.

Thanks, both points are fair. The counting script already prints a WARN for every plain rule that comes after the first splat or placeholder, but it only warns. Adding process.exit(1) on that line would turn it into a failed build, which is what you describe. On the SPA fallback: the curl check compares both the status code and the Location header, so a 200 without a redirect shows up as a FAIL, not a pass.

Search Hashnode

Why Cloudflare Pages Stopped Reading My _redirects at About 120 Rules

Responses4