Get the Current URL with JavaScript?

Matthew C.

The Problem

You want to get the current website URL on a page. How do you do this?

The Solution

There are multiple ways to get the current URL using JavaScript. Technically, we’ll use Web APIs, which are not a part of the JavaScript language but are used with JavaScript. You can use the globally scoped Window and Document web API interfaces to get the current URL in a browser.

The Window interface represents a window containing a DOM document. It has a document property that points to the DOM Document loaded in the window. This is the Document interface that represents the DOM tree of a loaded web page in the browser.

The window.location and document.location (which is the same as window.document.location) properties are read-only and return a Location object. This object contains information about the current URL, including the following properties:

{
    "ancestorOrigins": {},
    "href": "https://sentry.io/answers/capture-errors/",
    "origin": "https://sentry.io",
    "protocol": "https:",
    "host": "sentry.io",
    "hostname": "sentry.io",
    "port": "",
    "pathname": "/answers/capture-errors/",
    "search": "",
    "hash": ""
}

To get the current URL, get the href property value:

window.location.href // 'https://sentry.io/answers/capture-errors/'
// or
document.location.href // 'https://sentry.io/answers/capture-errors/'

You can also get the values of the following properties on the window object to get the current URL:

document.URL // 'https://sentry.io/answers/capture-errors/'
document.documentURI // 'https://sentry.io/answers/capture-errors/'

If you need to parse the URL, you can create a URL interface with the current URL. It has useful methods for parsing a URL, for example, you can get search parameter values by their names:

const urlObj = new URL(window.location.href);
console.log(urlObj.href) // https://unsplash.com/s/photos/cat?order_by=latest&orientation=landscape&color=yellow
console.log(urlObj.searchParams.get('color')); // yellow

The URL interface is also used to construct, normalize, and encode URLs.