no-http-redirects checks if there are any HTTP redirects in the page
webhint is analyzing.
Consider the following simplified description of what happens when a user requests a URL within a browser:
- DNS Lookup: Translate the server domain to an IP. If the browser doesn’t know it, it asks a DNS server which in some cases involves multiple queries until the final IP is obtained.
- Open a TCP connection to the server IP address requesting the URL.
- The server responds to that request by sending some content over the TCP connection. If the resource uses SSL, then TLS negotiation(s) happens as well.
When a redirect occurs, 3. contains the new URL the browser needs to
request, repeating the whole sequence of steps. DNS Lookup isn’t cheap,
neither is creating a TCP connection. The
impact of redirects is felt even more by mobile users, where the network
latency is usually higher.
As a rule of thumb, the more you can avoid redirects the better.
This hint checks:
- If the target URL passed to
webhinthas any redirect. E.g.:http://www.example.com-->http://example.com - If any resource in the page has any redirect. E.g.:
http://example.com/script.js-->https://example.com/script.js
and alerts if at least one is found.
- Any URL passed to
webhintthat redirects to another one - Any page with a resource (script, css, image) behind a redirect
- No redirect for resources nor the target URL.
By default, no redirects are allowed but you can change this behavior.
The following hint configuration used in the .hintrc
file will allow 3 redirects for resources and 1 for the main URL:
{
"connector": {...},
"formatters": [...],
"hints": {
"no-http-redirects": ["error", {
"max-resource-redirects": 3,
"max-html-redirects": 1
}],
...
},
...
}This package is installed automatically by webhint:
npm install hint --save-devTo use it, activate it via the .hintrc configuration file:
{
"connector": {...},
"formatters": [...],
"hints": {
"no-http-redirects": "error",
...
},
"parsers": [...],
...
}Note: The recommended way of running webhint is as a devDependency of
your project.