Nginx: rewrite http status message in the header (not body) - nginx

In Nginx, I want to customize the status code message right after the status code:
such as this is the default:
HTTP/1.1 429
and I want to do this:
HTTP/1.1 429 Too many requests
How can I get it done please? Note this is the header not the body at all.

Related

The http status code of BadRequestKeyError

I recently used postman to test a website and it returns BadRequestKeyError with http status code 500
but its return webpage's title shows
<title>werkzeug.exceptions.BadRequestKeyError: 400 Bad Request: The browser (or proxy) sent a request that this
server could not understand.
KeyError: 'user'
// Werkzeug Debugger</title>
so what is its http status code 500 or 400 ?
The http status code of BadRequestKeyError

How can I customize HTTP 400 responses for parse errors?

I've written a REST API service that requires that all responses be JSON. However, when the Go HTTP request parser encounters an error, it returns 400 as a plain text response without ever calling my handlers. Example:
> curl -i -H 'Authorization: Basic hi
there' 'http://localhost:8080/test' -v
* Trying ::1...
* TCP_NODELAY set
* Connected to localhost (::1) port 8080 (#0)
> GET /test HTTP/1.1
> Host: localhost:8080
> User-Agent: curl/7.54.0
> Accept: */*
> Authorization: Basic hi
> there
>
< HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
< Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
< Connection: close
Connection: close
<
* Closing connection 0
Note the invalid Authorization header. Of course 400 is the proper response, but it's text/plain, of course. Is there some way to configure the Go http parser to use custom error response media types and bodies?
You can't. You can find this in net/http source, it only happens if the request was malformed:
https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/net/http/server.go#L1744
I think your problem might be a new line in the header you're adding in curl?
401, 403, 404, 500 errors you'll be able to respond with json, but bad requests or bad headers (too long, malformed) are handled within server.go.
There is at present no way to intercept such errors though it is under consideration, so your only solution in go would be to patch the stdlib source (I don't recommend this). However, since this error only presents if the client has made a mistake and the request is malformed, it's probably not a huge problem. The reason for the text response is so that a browser or similar client (like curl without -v) doesn't just see an empty response. You could put a proxy like nginx in front of your app but then you'd never see the request either as it is a bad request, your proxy would handle it.
Possibly you'd be able to do it with a proxy like nginx in front though if you set a specific static error page for it to serve for 400 errors and serve a 400.json file that you specify? That's the only solution I can think of. A directive something like this might work for nginx:
error_page 400 /400.json;
If you'd like to be able to customise these errors, perhaps add a comment to the issue linked to let them know you had this specific problem.
If you are using the standard net/http library you can use the following code. Take a look at this answer Showing custom 404 error page with standard http package #Mostafa to which I got this example from
func homeHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
if r.URL.Path != "/" {
errorHandler(w, r, http.StatusNotFound)
return
}
fmt.Fprint(w, "welcome home")
}
func errorHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request, status int) {
w.WriteHeader(status)
if status == http.StatusNotFound {
// JSON Out here
}
}

HTTP header 400 bad request response

I'm trying to test writing correct HTTP headers to understand
the syntax. Here I'm trying to PUT some text into httpbin.org/put and I expect the response body content to be the same.
PUT /HTTP/1.1
Host: httpbin.org
Accept-Language: en-us
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-type: text/plain
Content-Length: 12
Hello jerome
However I'm getting the following bad request 400 response:
HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2016 12:34:02 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 166
Connection: close
Response:
<html>
<head><title>400 Bad Request</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>400 Bad Request</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx</center>
</body>
</html>
What syntactical errors have I done?
NOTE: newlines are \r\n not \n in the request.
Apparently the correct syntax goes like this for PUT:
PUT /put HTTP/1.1\r\n
Content-Length: 11\r\n
Content-Type: text/plain\r\n
Host: httpbin.org\r\n\r\n
hello lala\n
I believe I didn't say much on how I connected to httpbin.org; it was via sockets in C. So the connection was already established before sending the header + message.
You miss the destination url following the PUT verb, the first line must be:
PUT http://httpbin.org/ HTTP/1.1
This will probably also fail, you need one of their handler urls so they know what to reply with:
PUT http://httpbin.org/put HTTP/1.1
The general form of the first line, or Request Line, in an HTTP request is as follows:
<method> <path component of URL, or absolute URL> HTTP/<Version>\r\n
Where for your example, the method is PUT. Including an absolute URL (so, starting with http:// or https:// is only necessary when connecting to a proxy, because the proxy will then attempt to retrieve that URL, rather than attempt to serve a local resource (as found by the path component).
As presented, the only change you should have needed to make was ensuring there was a space between the / and HTTP/1.1. Otherwise, the path would be "/HTTP/1.1"... which would be a 404, if it weren't already a badly formed request. /HTTP/1.1 being interpreted as a path means the HTTP server that's parsing your request line doesn't find the protocol specifier (the HTTP/1.1 bit) before the terminating \r\n... and that's one example of how 400 response codes are born.
Hope that helped. Consult the HTTP 1.1 RFC (2616), section 5.1 for more information and the official definitions.

Nginx return statement not accepting "text"

Following config is working for me:
server {
listen 80;
root /app/web;
index index.json;
location / {
return 409;
}
}
If I hit the website the 409 page will be presented. However following is not working:
server {
listen 80;
root /app/web;
index index.json;
location / {
return 409 "foobar";
}
}
The page is unreachable. But according to the docs http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_rewrite_module.html#return
return 409 "foobar";
should work. Any ideas whats wrong? There are no logs in nginx/error.log.
The thing is, Nginx does exactly what you ask it to do. You can verify this by calling curl -v http://localhost (or whatever hostname you use). The result will look somewhat like this:
* Rebuilt URL to: http://localhost/
* Hostname was NOT found in DNS cache
* Trying 127.0.0.1...
* Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1) port 80 (#0)
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: curl/7.35.0
> Host: localhost
> Accept: */*
>
< HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict
* Server nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu) is not blacklisted
< Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)
< Date: Fri, 08 May 2015 19:43:12 GMT
< Content-Type: application/octet-stream
< Content-Length: 6
< Connection: keep-alive
<
* Connection #0 to host localhost left intact
foobar
As you can see, Nginx returns both 409 and foobar, as you ordered.
So the real question here is why your browser shows the pretty formatted error page when there is no custom text after the return code, and the gray "unreachable" one, when such text is present.
And the answer is: because of the Content-Type header value.
The HTTP standard states that some response codes should or must come with the response body. To comply with the standard, Nginx does this: whenever you return a special response code without the required body, the web server sends its own hardcoded HTML response to the client. And a part of this response is the header Content-Type: text/html. This is why you see that pretty white error page, when you do return 409 without the text part — because of this header your browser knows that the returned data is HTML and it renders it as HTML.
On the other hand, when you do specify the text part, there is no need for Nginx to send its own version of the body. So it just sends back to the client your text, the response code and the value of Content-Type that matches the requested file (see /etc/nginx/mime.types).
When there is no file, like when you request a folder or a site root, the default MIME type is used instead. And this MIME type is application/octet-stream, which defines some binary data. Since most browsers have no idea how to render random binary data, they do the best they can, that is, they show their own hardcoded error pages.
And this is why you get what you get.
Now if you want to make your browser to show your foobar, you need to send a suitable Content-Type. Something like text/plain or text/html. Usually, this can be done with add_header, but not in your case, for this directive works only with a limited list of response codes (200, 201, 204, 206, 301, 302, 303, 304, or 307).
The only other option I see is to rewrite your original request to something familiar to Nginx, so that it could use a value from /etc/nginx/mime.types for Content-Type:
server {
listen 80;
root /app/web;
index index.json;
location / {
rewrite ^.*$ /index.html;
return 409 "foobar";
}
}
This might seem somewhat counter-intuitive but this will work.
EDIT:
It appears that the Content-Type can be set with the default_type directive. So you can (and should) use default_type text/plain; instead of the rewrite line.
Updating #ivan-tsirulev 's answer:
By now you can set headers even for page with status codes for errors using always.
location #custom_error_page {
return 409 "foobar";
add_header Content-Type text/plain always;
}
But if you set default_type, the response headers will have two Content-Type headers: default, then added. Nevertheless, it works fine.

Can a response to an http request error be gziped?

When trying to execute an http request that causes a 400 Bad Request error, an nginx server returns the "400 Bad Request", a Content-Encoding: gzip, and the response in a non-encoded format.
So because of the Content-Encoding: gzip my code wraps the response with a GZIPInputStream which throws an error.
My question is: is gzip a valid encoding when the status code is not "200 OK"? if not, I can simply check for the status code and not try to gzip if anything other than 200 was returned.
Are there rules/guidelines about this? Is this documented anywhere?
TIA
Yes, it is a valid encoding. Content-Encoding (and Transfer-Encoding) are orthogonal to status codes.

Resources