How to follow HTTP redirects in Node.js

One of the biggest annoyance with Node.js’ native HTTP and HTTPS clients is that there is no way to automatically follow HTTP redirects. Let’s say you want to fetch the content of a page that has moved (301 redirect), you will have to write a lot of boilerplate code to handle the redirect(s) by yourself.

Since following redirects is fairly common, I decided to write a a drop-in replacement for the native HTTP and HTTPS module that would handle redirection seamlessly.

This module has exactly the same interface has the native HTTP and HTTPS module but it will handle redirects automatically. In other words, if you want to automatically start following redirects, all you have to do is replace

var http = require('http');

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

Before that, you will of course need to install the module through NPM:

npm install follow-redirects

Here are some usage examples:

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

/* 
 * http and https are just like Node.js' http and https modules except 
 * that they follow redirects seamlessly. 
 */

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

/*
 * You can optionnally pass the maxRedirect option which defaults to 5
 */

https.request({
  host: 'bitly.com',
  path: '/UHfDGO',
  maxRedirects: 3
}, function (res) {
  res.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log(chunk);
  });
}).on('error', function (err) {
  console.error(err);
});

More info is available at the Github repository: https://github.com/olalonde/follow-redirects/

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