Add permanent url for the latest Linkerd docs

[travisbeckham]

Overview

Add a permanent url for the latest Linkerd docs, making /docs/ a real url, and /{latestMajorVersion}/ a redirect.

For example, while 2.19 is the latest major version, linkerd.io/2.19/ will redirect to linkerd.io/docs/, but once 2.20 is released, linkerd.io/2.19/ would become an actual directory that is not indexed. Only linkerd.io/docs/ and linkerd.io/2-edge/ will be indexed.

With this change, we should not use the /2/ Cloudflare redirect in the content anymore, we can just use /docs/. We will leave the Cloudflare redirect in place for existing external links, but we should stop using it internally so our linting can check these links.

Even though this is a major change, all existing links internally and externally should continue to work.

This change was motivated by comments in issue #1849.

High-level Changes

• All of the latest docs are moved to content/docs/.

• An alias is automatically generated for every page in the latest docs. E.g.: linkerd.io/2.19/reference redirects to linkerd.io/docs/reference

• All older versions of docs are in directories named by their version (same as today), and now have a noindex meta tag set. E.g.: linkerd.io/2.18, linkerd.io/2.17, etc

• Docs images have been moved to the static directory

• All internal links that used the Cloudflare /2/ redirect have been updated to point to /docs/, except links that are part of CLI output.

• Each version (linkerd.io/docs, linkerd.io/2.17, etc) now redirects to the Getting Started page, instead of Overview.

• After this change is merged, the Cloudflare /2/ redirect should be updated to point to /docs/, which means we will not have to update this anymore where there's a new major version 🎉.

Preview links

• https://deploy-preview-2116--linkerdio.netlify.app/2.19/reference/
• https://deploy-preview-2116--linkerdio.netlify.app/2025/10/20/hands-off-linkerd-certificate-rotation/

Question for reviewers

• Do we want to add the noindex meta tag to older version of the docs, so only linkerd.io/docs/ and linkerd.io/2-edge/ will be indexed? Currently, older versions do not show up in sitemap.xml.

[wmorgan]

Is there a step we need in here to make the per-file 2.20 -> docs redirects? Or is that only needed as a one-time thing for 2.19?

[travisbeckham]

All of the {latestVersion} -> docs redirects are generated at build time. You can see this in alias-latest-docs.html‎

(or am I not understanding your question?)