How to test an HTTP 301 redirect?
How can one easily test HTTP return codes, like, say, a 301 redirect?
For example, if I want to "see what's going on", I can use telnet to do something like this:
... $ telnet nytimes.com 80
Trying 199.239.136.200...
Connected to nytimes.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
(enter)
(enter)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Sun-ONE-Web-Server/6.1
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2010 12:18:04 GMT
Content-type: text/html
Set-cookie: RMID=007af83f42dd4c161dfcce7d; expires=Tuesday, 14-Jun-2011 12:18:04 GMT; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Set-cookie: adxcs=-; path=/; domain=.nytimes.com
Expires: Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT
Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Connection: close
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
...
Which is an easy way to access quite some infos.
But now I want to test that a 301 redirect is indeed a 301 redirect.
How can I do so?
Basically, instead of getting a HTTP/1.1 200 OK I'd like to know how I can get the 301?
I know that I can enter the name of the URL in a browser and "see" that I'm redirected, but I'd like to know what tool(s) can be used to actually really "see" the 301 redirect.
Btw, I did test with a telnet, but when I enter www.example.org, which I redirected to example.org (without the www), all I can see is an "200 OK", I don't get to see the 301.
Answer
A far more convenient solution in my opinion is to use Curl.
Simply run:
$ curl -I http://example.com
And it will return the HTTP headers like this
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: nginx/1.1.19
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 10:41:47 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 161
Connection: keep-alive
Location: https://other.example.com/