Ruby Net::HTTP - following 301 redirects

Question

My users submit urls (to mixes on mixcloud.com) and my app uses them to perform web requests.

A good url returns a 200 status code:

Answer 1

Here is the code I came up with (derived from different examples) which will bail out if there are too many redirects (note that ensure_success is optional):

require "net/http"
require "uri"
class Net::HTTPResponse
  def ensure_success
    unless kind_of? Net::HTTPSuccess
      warn "Request failed with HTTP #{@code}"
      each_header do |h,v|
        warn "#{h} => #{v}"
      end
      abort
    end
  end
end
def do_request(uri_string)
  response = nil
  tries = 0
  loop do
    uri = URI.parse(uri_string)
    http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
    request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
    response = http.request(request)
    uri_string = response['location'] if response['location']
    unless response.kind_of? Net::HTTPRedirection
      response.ensure_success
      break
    end
    if tries == 10
      puts "Timing out after 10 tries"
      break
    end
    tries += 1
  end
  response
end