Difference between `redirect` and `redirect to` in Sinatra

Question

What is the difference between using redirect and redirect to in Sinatra? They both seem to default to the same status code. Is the to '/url' bit just some syntactic niceness to make the method more readable?

Answer 1

The redirect method sends the HTTP header to redirect the client to a given URL, and the argument passed should be a fully qualified URL with a host (e.g. http://example.com/path, not just /path).

The to method converts a path to a full URL for your Sinatra app, allowing the resulting URL to be used in redirect. E.g. to('/path') would become http://yoursinatraapp/path.