Alias Resolves Outside the Output Directory

An aliases: entry climbs above the site’s output directory.

Q-5-26 — Alias Resolves Outside the Output Directory

An aliases: entry climbs above the site’s output directory. Redirect stubs must be written inside the site.

What this means

A redirect stub is a file in your site’s output directory. An alias with enough ../ segments to climb out of it would write somewhere else on disk — outside the site, and outside anything you would deploy.

---
title: Deployment
aliases:
  - ../../old-site/deploy.html   # above the output directory
---

Why this happens

Relative aliases resolve against the page’s own output location, not against the project root. A page that renders deep in the tree can climb further than its author expected:

# renders to _site/index.html
aliases:
  - ../old.html    # one level above _site/ — rejected

Absolute aliases have the same limit: a leading / means the root of the site, so /../old.html also climbs out.

How to fix it

Use a site-root-relative alias, which is almost always what is meant:

aliases:
  - /old.html      # _site/old.html

If you need to redirect from a URL your Quarto project does not build, that redirect belongs in your web server or hosting configuration rather than in aliases:.

Difference from Quarto 1

Quarto 1 has no guard here and will write the file wherever the path lands.