How do I get the redirected url from the nodejs request module?

Solution 1:

There are two very easy ways to get hold of the last url in a chain of redirects.

var r = request(url, function (e, response) {
  r.uri
  response.request.uri
})

The uri is a object. uri.href contains the url, with query parameters, as a string.

The code comes from a comment on a github issue by request's creator: https://github.com/mikeal/request/pull/220#issuecomment-5012579

Example:

var request = require('request');
var r = request.get('http://google.com?q=foo', function (err, res, body) {
  console.log(r.uri.href);
  console.log(res.request.uri.href);

  // Mikael doesn't mention getting the uri using 'this' so maybe it's best to avoid it
  // please add a comment if you know why this might be bad
  console.log(this.uri.href);
});

This will print http://www.google.com/?q=foo three times (note that we were redirected to an address with www from one without).

Solution 2:

To find the redirect url try this:

var url = 'http://www.google.com';
request({ url: url, followRedirect: false }, function (err, res, body) {
  console.log(res.headers.location);
});

Solution 3:

request gets redirects by default, it can get through 10 redirects by default. You can check this in the docs. Downside of this is that you would not know if url you get is a redirected one or original one by default options.

For example:

request('http://www.google.com', function (error, response, body) {
    console.log(response.headers) 
    console.log(body) // Print the google web page.
})

gives output

> { date: 'Wed, 22 May 2013 15:11:58 GMT',
  expires: '-1',
  'cache-control': 'private, max-age=0',
  'content-type': 'text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1',
  server: 'gws',
  'x-xss-protection': '1; mode=block',
  'x-frame-options': 'SAMEORIGIN',
  'transfer-encoding': 'chunked' }

but if you give option followRedirect as false

request({url:'http://www.google.com',followRedirect :false}, function (error, response, body) {
    console.log(response.headers) 
    console.log(body)
});

it gives

> { location: 'http://www.google.co.in/',
  'cache-control': 'private',
  'content-type': 'text/html; charset=UTF-8',
  date: 'Wed, 22 May 2013 15:12:27 GMT',
  server: 'gws',
  'content-length': '221',
  'x-xss-protection': '1; mode=block',
  'x-frame-options': 'SAMEORIGIN' }
<HTML><HEAD><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html;charset=utf-8">
<TITLE>302 Moved</TITLE></HEAD><BODY>
<H1>302 Moved</H1>
The document has moved
<A HREF="http://www.google.co.in/">here</A>.
</BODY></HTML>

So don't worry about getting the redirected content. But if you want to know if it is redirected or not set followRedirect false and check the location header in the response.