tiny-http-redirect.md

title	timestamp	author	published	description	tags
Tiny HTTP redirect URL	2023-12-21 03:30:01 -0800	szabgab	true	HTTP Redirecting a page to another URL.	tiny_http web Header HeaderField AsciiString Request Response

Part of the Tiny HTTP series.

Sometimes you'd like to have a URL that, instead of showing content would redirect the browser to some other page on the same web site or on a different web site. For example I have a path on the Code Maven web site that will redirect the users to my YouTube channel: https://code-maven.com/youtube. I created this redirection so it will be easy for me to link to the channel and even to type it in when I need to do that.

I often need redirection behind a login page, so when someone visits a page and then wants to login to the website I can send the person back to the same page after s/he logged in. This can be implemented in the front-end without redirection, but if I'd like to do it in the back-end then redirection can be useful.

In technical terms a redirection is created by setting the status code to one of the appropriate numbers in the 300-399 range and adding a field called Location to the header with the target URL as the value.

There is a page listing all the HTTP response status codes and a separate page describing Redirections in HTTP in more details.

Rust code to redirect URL in Tiny HTTP

This is the core of the solution.

First we create a Header with a field called Location and a value supplied by the caller that is the target URL where w would like to redirect the user to.

Then we create a response. The content of the response can be an empty string. The status code must be set correctly and we need to add the header.

fn redirect(request: tiny_http::Request, site: &str, status_code: u16) {
    let header = Header {
        field: HeaderField::from_str("Location").unwrap(),
        value: AsciiString::from_ascii(site).unwrap(),
    };
    request
        .respond(
            Response::from_string("")
                .with_status_code(StatusCode::from(status_code))
                .with_header(header),
        )
        .unwrap();
}

This is how we would call it:

redirect(request, "https://rust.code-maven.com/", 302);

Where 302 means "temporary redirect".

full source code

{% include file="examples/tiny-http/redirect/Cargo.toml" %}

{% include file="examples/tiny-http/redirect/src/main.rs" %}