Recently I have found that PHP sometimes doesn't follow redirects (e.g. the get_headers() function). So I wrote this quick function to follow a url's redirects to a certain depth:

/*
 * @summary Follows a chain of redirects and returns that last url in the sequence.
 * 
 * @param $url - The url to start at.
 * @param $maxdepth - The maximum depth to which to travel following redirects.
 * 
 * @returns The url at the end of the redirect chain.
 */
function follow_redirects($url, $maxdepth = 10, $depth = 0)
{
    //return the current url if we have hit the maximum depth
    if($depth >= $maxdepth)
        return $url;

    //download the headers from the url and make all the keys lowercase
    $headers = get_headers($url, true);
    $headers = array_change_key_case($headers);
    //we have a redirect if the `location` header is set
    if(isset($headers["location"]))
    {
        return follow_redirects($headers["location"], $maxdepth, $depth + 1);
    }
    else
    {
        return $url;
    }
}

For example, you could do this:

follow_redirects("https://example.com/some/path", 5);

That would follow the redirects, starting at https://example.com/some/path, to a maximum depth of 5 urls.

When I learn networking in C♯ (and if it doesn't follow redirects), I will rewrite this function in C♯ for you.