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 (res) {
  res.on('data', function (chunk) {
    console.log(chunk);
  });
}).on('error', function (err) {
  console.error(err);
});

By default the number of redirects is limited to 5, but you can modify that globally or per request.

require('follow-redirects').maxRedirects = 10;   // Has global affect (be careful!)

https.request({
  host: 'bitly.com',
  path: '/UHfDGO',
  maxRedirects: 3   // per request setting
}, function (res) {/* ... */});

You can inspect the redirection chain from the fetchedUrls array on the response. The array is populated in reverse order, so the original url you requested will be the last element, while the final redirection point will be at index 0.

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

Due to the way XMLHttpRequest works, the browserify versions of http and https already follow redirects. If you are only targetting the browser, then this library has little value for you. If you want to write cross platform code for node and the browser, follow-redirects provides a great solution for making the native node modules behave the same as they do in browserified builds in the browser. To avoid bundling unnecessary code you should tell browserify to swap out follow-redirects with the standard modules when bundling. To make this easier, you need to change how you require the modules:

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

You can then replace follow-redirects in your browserify configuration like so:

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

The browserify-http module has not kept pace with node development, and no long behaves identically to the native module when running in the browser. If you are experiencing problems, you may want to check out browserify-http-2. It is more actively maintained and attempts to address a few of the shortcomings of browserify-http. In that case, your browserify config should look something like this:

"browser": {
  "follow-redirects/http"  : "browserify-http-2/http",
  "follow-redirects/https" : "browserify-http-2/https"
}

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.

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.

Olivier Lalonde (olalonde@gmail.com)

James Talmage (james@talmage.io)

MIT: http://olalonde.mit-license.org