How to get the current URL in JavaScript

To get the current URL of the page you opened in the browser using JavaScript you can rely on the location property exposed by the browser on the window object:

window.location

Since window is the global object in the browser, the property can be referenced as

location

This is a Location object which has many properties on its own:

The current page URL is exposed in

location.href

This gives you the full URL as a string, ready to log, store, or send somewhere:

location.href
//'https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/?page=2#comments'

The other location properties

Most of the time you don’t need the whole URL. You need one piece of it, like the path or the query string. The location object already splits everything for you:

Here’s what each one returns for the URL https://flaviocopes.com/javascript/?page=2#comments:

location.hostname //'flaviocopes.com'
location.origin   //'https://flaviocopes.com'
location.hash     //'#comments'
location.pathname //'/javascript/'
location.port     //''
location.protocol //'https:'
location.search   //'?page=2'

Notice two details. The protocol includes the trailing colon. And the port is an empty string when the page uses the default port for its protocol, like 443 for HTTPS.

Be careful when assigning to location.href

Reading location.href is safe. Writing to it is not the same thing: assigning a new value navigates the browser to that URL.

location.href = 'https://flaviocopes.com/access/'
//the browser loads this page

This is a common source of confusion. If your page unexpectedly redirects, look for a place in the code where something assigns to location.href instead of just reading it.

This only works in the browser

The window and location objects don’t exist in Node.js. If you run this code on the server, for example inside a server-rendered component, you’ll get a ReferenceError: window is not defined error.

On the server, get the URL from the incoming request object your framework gives you instead.

If you’re not sure which property maps to which part of a URL, I built a free URL parser tool that labels every part of any URL you paste in.