Earlier today I was enhancing some relatively old piece of NodeJS code, so I decided to convert it from axios to gaxios along the way. Most of the work was pretty transparent, since much smaller and better maintained gaxios is pretty much a drop-in replacement for axios, which seems to be stuck in it’s v0.x days forever.
However, there was one request that stood apart.
This request actually resulted in HTTP redirect, and my goal was to intercept the target URL and extract some query string parameters. In axios, that was straight-forward – it was enough to allow at most 0 redirects, and also make sure that HTTP 302 is not treated as an error:
const axios = require('axios');
const response = await axios.request({
...
maxRedirects: 0,
validateStatus: (status) => (status === 302)
});
const url = response.headers.location;
Yet, the same configuration produced different outcome in gaxios – the request was failing with "max redirects reached" error. My attempt to adjust maxRedirects value to 1 along with keeping status validation in place was not successful either – gaxios just issued another request to the new target.
To my surprise, quick googling did not reveal any relevant results. I took that as a hint that this is not only doable, but likely so trivial that nobody had to ask – so I continued with the digging. One of the merged PRs caused me to realize that gaxios is basically a wrapper on top of the Fetch API, and the configuration object is passed down to fetch implementation with minimal modifications. From here, the solution was simple –
const { request } = require('gaxios');
const response = await request({
...
redirect: 'manual',
validateStatus: (status) => (status === 302)
});
const url = response.headers.location;
Enjoy!