How to add pagination to a single post

Question

I have a template for a custom post-type single-continent.php which calls a secondary WP_Query loop to load a list of posts.

$query = new WP_Query(array(
    'meta_query'  => array($meta_queries),
    'order'       => 'DESC',
    'orderby'     => 'date',
    'paged'       => $paged,
    'post_status' => 'publish',
    'post_type'   => 'post'
));

The function is setup to use get_query_var() to check for page/paged but I cannot seem to make the URL /page/2 work. Instead I get a 301 redirect back to the continent. I can use /2 which is picked up by get_query_var('page') but not sure if this is the correct solution (and I need to be able to use this with the_posts_pagination.

Answer 1

Forgive me for answering my own question, but this post gave me the answer I needed: WP_Query Pagination on single-custom.php

I had to take a copy of the original wp_query

$original_query = $wp_query;

then assign my custom loop to the global $wp_query, and finally reset everything with

wp_reset_postdata();
$wp_query = $original_query;

In essence, this is what was missing:

function mytheme_template_redirect() {
    if(is_singular('continent')) {
        global $wp_query;
        $page = (int)$wp_query->get('page');
        if($page > 1) {
            $query->set('page', 1);
            $query->set('paged', $page);
        }
        remove_action('template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical');
    }
}

Called with:

add_action('template_redirect', 'mytheme_template_redirect', 0);

Everything works fine now as I'm no longer getting a 301 redirect when appending /page/2 to the (single) custom post URL