[thelist] Automated testing of hundreds of redirects

Matt Warden mwarden at gmail.com
Fri Apr 22 11:41:33 CDT 2011


We are changing the URLs for a large number of pages to be more SEO
friendly. I need to create an automated test to verify hundreds of
redirects from the old URL to the new URL. I have these mappings in
Excel, so generating assertions would be trivial.

The ideal situation would be where I can call the old URL, inspect the
Location header returned, and then ensure it is as specified in the
Excel mapping.

If I can't do that, then I could wget (or similar) each old and new
URL and compare the length of the response of each pair within some
small range (because there could be a small amount of dynamic content,
so I can't do a strict diff). This seems messy.

My question: what is the best way to do this? It smells to me like a
task that could be very trivial or very tedious depending on the
approach I choose.

Thoughts would be appreciated.

Happy Easter,

-- 
Matt Warden
Austin, TX, USA
http://mattwarden.com


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