A quick guide and code example on how to verify URL redirects by launching a real browser using Python and Selenium.

Firstly we’ll import webdriver, and the ‘time’ module (we’ll use that in a bit):

from selenium import webdriver
import time

Then we create a dictionary containing the target and redirect destination URLs:

urls = {
  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",

  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",

  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",
}

Specify our web driver (using safari for ease, as web driver built-in):

driver = webdriver.Safari()

Now we’ll iterate through each url in our dictionary:

for target, destination in urls.items():
  driver.get(target)

And allow 1 second before grabbing whatever URL we have arrived at in the address bar and saving into a new variable called ‘current_url’:

for target, destination in urls.items():
  driver.get(target)
  time.sleep(1)
  current_url = driver.current_url

Then we’ll compare where we’ve ended up with what we expect from our dictionary:

for target, destination in urls.items():
  driver.get(target)
  time.sleep(1)
  current_url = driver.current_url

  if current_url == destination:
    print(' - Redirect success')
  else:
    error = f'> Redirect error: {target} redirected to {current_url}, should have redirected to {destination}'

Putting it all together

from selenium import webdriver
import time

urls = {
  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",

  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",

  "https://www.targeturl.com" : "https://www.destinationurl.com",
}

driver = webdriver.Safari()

for target, destination in urls.items():
  driver.get(target)
  time.sleep(1)
  current_url = driver.current_url

  if current_url == destination:
    print(' - Redirect success')
  else:
    error = f'> Redirect error: {target} redirected to {current_url}, should have redirected to {destination}'

driver.close()