Cleaning up the Index Aliases

If you are one of the folks who enabled the "index aliases" feature and later found out that it wasn't such a great idea then you may be wondering how do I get rid of those aliases? Further, pathauto 5.x-2.x doesn't support them so they are now pretty useless.

You can see if you have any by opening up a connection to your database (e.g. using phpMyAdmin or the mysql shell tool) and running this query:

select * from url_alias where src like 'pathauto/%';

That will either say "Empty set (0.01 sec)" which means that you don't have any of these and can spend your time worrying about other things, OR it will return the records in your table that match this and then say something like "29 rows in set (0.00 sec)". So, if you get some number of rows in your set, you probably want to delete them.

First, confirm that you don't need them.

I had some records like this:

And indeed when I visit http://knaddison.com/technology I see that it's a page not found. Glad I haven't been using that!

To remove the aliases, it's another simple query to run in your database. It's also a good idea to make a backup before doing things like this "just in case".
delete from url_alias where src like 'pathauto/%';

That should say that it "affected" the same number of rows as your first query said that it found.

All done - your site is a little cleaner and should run slightly faster. Yay.

If you have any problems or other ideas about this please leave a comment.

To rebuild those index aliases with Views, read the integration with views section of Pathauto recipes.