How to Handle HTTP Redirects?

I'm working on a program that's meant to download a text file from the internet, but I'm running into errors when I try to work with redirects. I set up a URL to redirect to my main file, which has a long URL. This results in:

lua> content = http.get("snipped url").readAll()
lua:1: attempt to index ? (a nil value)

However, if I use the original URL, the code works fine. There seems to be a problem handling redirects. How would I get around this error?

Never mind this question, it turns out the loopback interface on my system was being stupid.