Redirect before 404 page

Question

I'm currently migrating a site to Drupal. The old site has thousands of dynamic URLs for which I cannot use a regular expression to handle them. Those URLs exist in a slightly different form in the Drupal site.
Unfortunately the URL structure is too complicated for being processed directly in a .htaccess file.

I want all the old URLs to return a 301 redirect to the new URL.

This is what I tried.

• I implemented hook_page_preprocess() and sent a RedirectResponse to the new URL when the incoming URL matches the regular expression for the old URLs
• I implemented an event subscriber that does basically the same on the onRequest event

In both the cases, the redirect response is sent with the following code.

$respond = new TrustedRedirectResponse($url,301);
$respond->send();
die();

Both solutions do work when the user is logged-in. In my local developing site, it works also when the user is not logged-in. On the live server, it doesn't work for anonymous users.

The funny thing is that, even when the redirection works for logged-in users, the log shows a Page not found entry for that URL. So it seems that even with the event subscriber solution, Drupal handles the 404 part first, and then executes my code.

What am I doing wrong?
Should I implement this differently?

Answer 1

I stumbled upon the same issue with Drupal 8.2.6: A 404 error was recorded even though my custom event subscriber was called.

Following what suggested in comments I read about the Redirect module, I set the event subscriber priority using the following code.

public static function getSubscribedEvents() {
  // This needs to run before RouterListener::onKernelRequest(), which has
  // a priority of 32. Otherwise, that aborts the request if no matching
  // route is found.
  $events[KernelEvents::REQUEST][] = array('onKernelRequest', 34);

  return $events;
}

This fixed the issue I was having.