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Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
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Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Mocking is an essential part of unit testing, and the Mockito library makes it easy to write clean and intuitive unit tests for your Java code.
Get started with mocking and improve your application tests using our Mockito guide:
Spring 5 added support for reactive programming with the Spring WebFlux module, which has been improved upon ever since. Get started with the Reactor project basics and reactive programming in Spring Boot:
Since its introduction in Java 8, the Stream API has become a staple of Java development. The basic operations like iterating, filtering, mapping sequences of elements are deceptively simple to use.
But these can also be overused and fall into some common pitfalls.
To get a better understanding on how Streams work and how to combine them with other language features, check out our guide to Java Streams:
Explore Spring Boot 3 and Spring 6 in-depth through building a full REST API with the framework:
Yes, Spring Security can be complex, from the more advanced functionality within the Core to the deep OAuth support in the framework.
I built the security material as two full courses - Core and OAuth, to get practical with these more complex scenarios. We explore when and how to use each feature and code through it on the backing project.
You can explore the course here:
Modern software architecture is often broken. Slow delivery leads to missed opportunities, innovation is stalled due to architectural complexities, and engineering resources are exceedingly expensive.
Orkes is the leading workflow orchestration platform built to enable teams to transform the way they develop, connect, and deploy applications, microservices, AI agents, and more.
With Orkes Conductor managed through Orkes Cloud, developers can focus on building mission critical applications without worrying about infrastructure maintenance to meet goals and, simply put, taking new products live faster and reducing total cost of ownership.
Try a 14-Day Free Trial of Orkes Conductor today.
Spring Data JPA is a great way to handle the complexity of JPA with the powerful simplicity of Spring Boot.
Get started with Spring Data JPA through the guided reference course:
Refactor Java code safely — and automatically — with OpenRewrite.
Refactoring big codebases by hand is slow, risky, and easy to put off. That’s where OpenRewrite comes in. The open-source framework for large-scale, automated code transformations helps teams modernize safely and consistently.
Each month, the creators and maintainers of OpenRewrite at Moderne run live, hands-on training sessions — one for newcomers and one for experienced users. You’ll see how recipes work, how to apply them across projects, and how to modernize code with confidence.
Join the next session, bring your questions, and learn how to automate the kind of work that usually eats your sprint time.
Yes, we're now running our Black Friday Sale. All Access and Pro are 33% off until 2nd December, 2025:
1. Introduction
Understanding how URLs are redirected is crucial in web development and network programming tasks, such as handling HTTP redirects, validating URL redirects, or extracting final destination URLs. In Java, we can accomplish this functionality using HttpURLConnection or HttpClient libraries.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore different approaches to finding the redirected URL of a given URL in Java.
2. Using HttpURLConnection
Java provides the HttpURLConnection class, which allows us to make HTTP requests and handle responses. Also, we can make use of the HttpURLConnection to find the redirected URL of a given URL. Here’s how it can be done:
String canonicalUrl = "http://www.baeldung.com/";
String expectedRedirectedUrl = "https://www.baeldung.com/";
@Test
public void givenOriginalUrl_whenFindRedirectUrlUsingHttpURLConnection_thenCorrectRedirectedUrlReturned() throws IOException {
URL url = new URL(canonicalUrl);
HttpURLConnection connection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();
connection.setInstanceFollowRedirects(true);
int status = connection.getResponseCode();
String redirectedUrl = null;
if (status == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_PERM || status == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_TEMP) {
redirectedUrl = connection.getHeaderField("Location");
}
connection.disconnect();
assertEquals(expectedRedirectedUrl, redirectedUrl);
}Here, we define the original URL string (canonicalUrl) and the redirected URL (expectedRedirectedUrl). Then, we create an HttpURLConnection object and open a connection to the original URL.
Afterward, we set the instanceFollowRedirects property to true to enable automatic redirection. Upon receiving the response, we examine the status code to determine if redirection occurred. If redirection occurs, we retrieve the redirected URL from the “Location” header.
Finally, we disconnect the connection and assert that the retrieved redirected URL matches the expected one.
3. Using Apache HttpClient
Alternatively, we can use Apache HttpClient, a more versatile HTTP client library for Java. Apache HttpClient provides more advanced features and better support for handling HTTP requests and responses. Here’s how we can find the redirected URL using Apache HttpClient:
@Test
public void givenOriginalUrl_whenFindRedirectUrlUsingHttpClient_thenCorrectRedirectedUrlReturned() throws IOException {
RequestConfig config = RequestConfig.custom()
.setRedirectsEnabled(false)
.build();
try (CloseableHttpClient httpClient = HttpClients.custom().setDefaultRequestConfig(config).build()) {
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet(canonicalUrl);
try (CloseableHttpResponse response = httpClient.execute(httpGet)) {
int statusCode = response.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
String redirectedUrl = null;
if (statusCode == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_PERM || statusCode == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_MOVED_TEMP) {
org.apache.http.Header[] headers = response.getHeaders("Location");
if (headers.length > 0) {
redirectedUrl = headers[0].getValue();
}
}
assertEquals(expectedRedirectedUrl, redirectedUrl);
}
}
}In this test, we begin by configuring the request to deactivate automatic redirection. Subsequently, we instantiate a CloseableHttpClient and dispatch an HttpGet request to the original URL.
Upon obtaining the response, we analyze the status code and headers to ascertain whether redirection occurred. In the event of redirection, we extract the redirected URL from the Location header.
4. Conclusion
In this article, we discussed how handling redirection correctly is essential for building robust web applications that interact with external resources. We’ve explored how to find the redirected URL of a given URL using both HttpURLConnection and Apache HttpClient.
The code backing this article is available on GitHub. Once you're logged in as a Baeldung Pro Member, start learning and coding on the project.
