The part where I realize that my HTTP status code knowledge is rusty

To debug a tricky situation1, I used Vapor to respond with 302 Found to an HTTP request. Here is the code I ended up with.

import Vapor

struct FoundWrapper {
    let location: String
}

extension FoundWrapper: ResponseEncodable {
    public func encodeResponse(for request: Request)
        -> EventLoopFuture<Response> {
        var headers = HTTPHeaders()
        headers.add(name: .location, value: location)
        return request.eventLoop.makeSucceededFuture(.init(
            status: .found, headers: headers
        ))
    }
}

func routes(_ app: Application) throws {
    app.get("redirect") { _ in
        FoundWrapper(location: "https://foo.tld/bar")
    }
}

This is the response when requesting that route:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
location: https://foo.tld/bar

At first, I was surprised that this code was not covered by the Redirections section of Vapor’s documentation. But then I learned that many browsers broke how the 302 status code was intended to behave, and that 303 See Other and 307 Temporary Redirect should now be favored.

Anyways, this code is useful to respond with an arbitrary status code, and arbitrary header values. I’m saving it here. 😉

The part where I get things right

So in this particular situation, the right option was responding with 303 See Other.

Here is the code to do so:

func routes(_ app: Application) throws {
    app.get("redirect") { req in
        req.redirect(
            to: "https://foo.tld/bar",
            type: .normal // 303 See Other
        )
    }
}

This is the response when requesting that route:

HTTP/1.1 303 See Other
location: https://foo.tld/bar

The .normal type being the default, I could have omitted it. But I like to include defaults in my code when they are not that obvious. It can spare my future self a click to access the doc to remember what the default status code is.

  1. “Getting a good experience when clicking an event link in an e-mail”, see details in this Stack Overflow thread. ↩