How to redirect from HTTP to HTTPS with Beast C++ library?

Question

I am studying the Boost.Beast library. I try to make a request whose response is:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Cache-Control: public
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Location: https://www.example.com/target/xxx/

Then, I try to make a request with this location field but I receive the bad request response.

How can I do the redirection? Is there an example?

This is my code:

boost::asio::io_service ios;
tcp::resolver resolver{ios};
tcp::socket socket{ios};
auto const lookup = resolver.resolve( tcp::resolver::query(host, port) );
boost::asio::connect(socket, lookup);

// Set up an HTTP GET request message
http::request<http::string_body> req{http::verb::get, target, 11};
req.set(http::field::host, host);
req.set(http::field::user_agent, BOOST_BEAST_VERSION_STRING);

// Send the HTTP request to the remote host
http::write(socket, req);

// This buffer is used for reading and must be persisted
boost::beast::flat_buffer buffer;

// Declare a container to hold the response
http::response<http::dynamic_body> res;

// Receive the HTTP response
http::read(socket, buffer, res);

if( res.base().result_int() == 301 ) {
   req.set(http::field::location, res.base()["Location"]);
   http::write(socket, req);
   boost::beast::flat_buffer buffer1;
   http::read(socket, buffer1, res);
}
std::cout << req << std::endl;
std::cout << res << std::endl;

Thanks

Answer 1

When you redirect, you cannot just "replace" a location on the existing request. You cannot even use the same socket, except in the rare cases when the redirected target is on the same TCP endpoint.

Because the host name, protocol and path might have changed, you do have to parse the location, get the scheme, host, path parts. Then you must do proper host resolution again, and make sure to use the right host name in the Host header.

Here's a sample that shows requesting the Boost License at the "wrong" url http://boost.org/user/license.html, which will promptly redirect to http://www.boost.org/user/license.html.

NOTE I've used network::uri to do the URI parsing for us: https://github.com/reBass/uri

Demo

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/beast.hpp>
#include <boost/beast/http.hpp>
#include <network/uri.hpp>
#include <boost/asio.hpp>
#include <string>

using boost::asio::ip::tcp;
namespace http = boost::beast::http;

struct Requester {
    void do_request(std::string const& url) {
        network::uri u{url};
        auto const lookup = resolver_.resolve( tcp::resolver::query(u.host().to_string(), u.scheme().to_string()) );

        // Set up an HTTP GET request message
        tcp::socket socket{ios};
        boost::asio::connect(socket, lookup);

        http::request<http::string_body> req{http::verb::get, u.path().to_string(), 11};
        req.keep_alive(true);

        req.set(http::field::host, u.host().to_string());
        req.set(http::field::user_agent, BOOST_BEAST_VERSION_STRING);

        std::cout << "Target: " << url << "\n";
        std::cout << req << "\n";

        http::write(socket, req);
        boost::beast::flat_buffer buffer;
        http::response<http::dynamic_body> res;
        http::read(socket, buffer, res);

        switch(res.base().result_int()) {
            case 301: 
                std::cout << "Redirecting.....\n";
                do_request(res.base()["Location"].to_string());
                break;
            case 200:
                std::cout << res << "\n";
                break;
            default:
                std::cout << "Unexpected HTTP status " << res.result_int() << "\n";
                break;
        }
    }
  private:
    boost::asio::io_service ios;
    tcp::resolver resolver_{ios};
};

int main() {
    try {
        Requester requester;
        requester.do_request("http://boost.org/users/license.html"); // redirects to http://www.boost.org/...
    } catch(std::exception const& e) {
        std::cerr << "Exception: " << e.what() << "\n";
    }
}

This prints:

Target: http://boost.org/users/license.html
GET /users/license.html HTTP/1.1
Host: boost.org
User-Agent: Boost.Beast/109


Redirecting.....
Target: http://www.boost.org/users/license.html
GET /users/license.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.boost.org
User-Agent: Boost.Beast/109


HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 2017 22:25:20 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.15 (CentOS)
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

90fd
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head>
  <title>Boost Software License</title>
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii" />
  <link rel="icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/ico" />
  <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../style-v2/section-boost.css" />
  <!--[if IE 7]> <style type="text/css"> body { behavior: url(/style-v2/csshover3.htc); } </style> <![endif]-->
</head><!--
Note: Editing website content is documented at:
http://www.boost.org/development/website_updating.html
-->

<body>
    ENTIRE LICENSE BODY SNIPPED
</body>
</html>

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