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
    Creating Scrolling Parallax Effects with CSS

    Introduction For quite a long time now websites with the so called "parallax" effect have been really popular. In case you have not heard of this effect, it basically includes different layers of images that are moving in different directions or with different speed. This leads to a...

  • By
    Animated 3D Flipping Menu with CSS

    CSS animations aren't just for basic fades or sliding elements anymore -- CSS animations are capable of much more.  I've showed you how you can create an exploding logo (applied with JavaScript, but all animation is CSS), an animated Photo Stack, a sweet...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows

    Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them.  For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked.  Just because we...

  • By
    dwImageProtector Plugin for jQuery

    I've always been curious about the jQuery JavaScript library. jQuery has captured the hearts of web designers and developers everywhere and I've always wondered why. I've been told it's easy, which is probably why designers were so quick to adopt it NOT that designers...

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!