README.md



Follow Redirects

Drop-in replacement for Nodes http and https that automatically follows redirects.


follow-redirects provides request and get
 methods that behave identically to those found on the native http and https
 modules, with the exception that they will seamlessly follow redirects.

var http = require('follow-redirects').http;
var https = require('follow-redirects').https;

http.get('http://bit.ly/900913', function (response) {
  response.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log(chunk);
  });
}).on('error', function (err) {
  console.error(err);
});


You can inspect the final redirected URL through the responseUrl property on the response.
If no redirection happened, responseUrl is the original request URL.

https.request({
  host: 'bitly.com',
  path: '/UHfDGO',
}, function (response) {
  console.log(response.responseUrl);
  // 'http://duckduckgo.com/robots.txt'
});


Options


Global options

Global options are set directly on the follow-redirects module:

var followRedirects = require('follow-redirects');
followRedirects.maxRedirects = 10;
followRedirects.maxBodyLength = 20 * 1024 * 1024; // 20 MB


The following global options are supported:


maxRedirects (default: 21) – sets the maximum number of allowed redirects; if exceeded, an error will be emitted.
maxBodyLength (default: 10MB) – sets the maximum size of the request body; if exceeded, an error will be emitted.


Per-request options

Per-request options are set by passing an options object:

var url = require('url');
var followRedirects = require('follow-redirects');

var options = url.parse('http://bit.ly/900913');
options.maxRedirects = 10;
http.request(options);


In addition to the standard HTTP and HTTPS options,
the following per-request options are supported:


followRedirects (default: true) – whether redirects should be followed.
maxRedirects (default: 21) – sets the maximum number of allowed redirects; if exceeded, an error will be emitted.
maxBodyLength (default: 10MB) – sets the maximum size of the request body; if exceeded, an error will be emitted.
agents (default: undefined) – sets the agent option per protocol, since HTTP and HTTPS use different agents. Example value: { http: new http.Agent(), https: new https.Agent() }
trackRedirects (default: false) – whether to store the redirected response details into the redirects array on the response object.


Advanced usage

By default, follow-redirects will use the Node.js default implementations
of http
and https.
To enable features such as caching and/or intermediate request tracking,
you might instead want to wrap follow-redirects around custom protocol implementations:

var followRedirects = require('follow-redirects').wrap({
  http: require('your-custom-http'),
  https: require('your-custom-https'),
});


Such custom protocols only need an implementation of the request method.


Browser Usage

Due to the way the browser works,
the http and https browser equivalents perform redirects by default.

By requiring follow-redirects this way:

var http = require('follow-redirects/http');
var https = require('follow-redirects/https');


you can easily tell webpack and friends to replace
follow-redirect by the built-in versions:

{
  "follow-redirects/http"  : "http",
  "follow-redirects/https" : "https"
}


Contributing

Pull Requests are always welcome. Please file an issue
 detailing your proposal before you invest your valuable time. Additional features and bug fixes should be accompanied
 by tests. You can run the test suite locally with a simple npm test command.


Debug Logging

follow-redirects uses the excellent debug for logging. To turn on logging
 set the environment variable DEBUG=follow-redirects for debug output from just this module. When running the test
 suite it is sometimes advantageous to set DEBUG=* to see output from the express server as well.


Authors


Olivier Lalonde (olalonde@gmail.com)
James Talmage (james@talmage.io)
Ruben Verborgh


License

MIT License