Get Redirect URL with cURL

By  on  

URL redirects can be glorious or annoying depending on which side of them you are on and which side you want to be on.  Redirects are helpful for vanity URLs (useful in advertising) but sometimes they're annoying in that they could potentially break your code if you encounter a redirect you weren't anticipating.

The useful and amazing cURL command line utility allows you to fetch an address and return its final destination URL:

# "/css" doesn't exist but WordPress tries to find the closest match
# and then redirects to it ("/css-animation-callback")

curl -Ls -w %{url_effective} -o /dev/null https://davidwalsh.name/css

# Outputs: https://davidwalsh.name/css-animation-callback

The url_effective variable is what we're after.  The L directive tells cURL to follow redirects, the s directive tells cURL to be silent (i.e. not output the page contents).  You provide the URL, cURL follows it to its endpoint -- easy!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

  • By
    Write Better JavaScript with Promises

    You've probably heard the talk around the water cooler about how promises are the future. All of the cool kids are using them, but you don't see what makes them so special. Can't you just use a callback? What's the big deal? In this article, we'll...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebKit-Specific Style:  -webkit-appearance

    I was recently scoping out the horrid source code of the Google homepage when I noticed the "Google Search" and "I'm Feeling Lucky" buttons had a style definition I hadn't seen before:  -webkit-appearance.  The value assigned to the style was "push-button."  They are buttons so that...

  • By
    Highlighter: A MooTools Search & Highlight Plugin

    Searching within the page is a major browser functionality, but what if we could code a search box in JavaScript that would do the same thing? I set out to do that using MooTools and ended up with a pretty decent solution. The MooTools JavaScript Class The...

Discussion

  1. J-K. Solbakken

    Follow a URL using JavaScript: https://www.npmjs.com/package/linkfollower

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!