In a Play application I recently found myself wanting to redirect GET / to GET /elsewhere. I could have mapped GET / to a real controller which always performs the same redirect. But do I have to?

It turns out that Play has a Default controller1 which has some useful methods:

  • error returns a 500 Internal Server Error
  • notFound returns a 404 Not Found
  • redirect takes a string argument and redirects there with a 303 See Other
  • todo returns a 501 Not Implemented

In my case I have this in my routes file:

GET  /           controllers.Default.redirect(to = "/elsewhere")
GET  /elsewhere  controllers.ElsewhereController.index

Now GET / requests are redirected:

$ curl -I localhost:9000
HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
Location: /elsewhere
Content-Length: 0
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 2016 12:21:52 GMT

  1. Check out the API documentation for more details. To see the four methods I mention, set the “Inherited” section to “Hide All” and select both “Default” options. ↩