Rails from the ground up: Status Codes & Headers

22 Jul 2014

Rails from the ground up: Status Codes & Headers

Now that we know what the tiniest possible response looks like, we can talk about what a valid and correct HTTP response looks like. That means explaining status codes and headers.

To send a fully correct HTTP response, we need to first tell the client our HTTP version and the status code of our response. Status codes tell the client what kind of response is going to be sent.

For the smallest possible response, we only need one status code: 200 OK. That code means everything is okay on the server, and a response is about to be sent.

Other common status codes include 302 Found, 404 Not Found, and various other messages that are useful to send to a browser or other HTTP client. There are a lot of status codes, so feel free to read more about all of them if you’re interested.

So, the first line of a valid response simply declares the version of HTTP that the server supports and the status code:

HTTP/1.0 200 OK

The next line (and subsequent lines, until there is a completely blank line) are all headers. Similar to the client headers that we saw in the previous post, response headers consist of a name, a colon and space, and then a value. They contain information about the response that is being sent, but are not considered part of the response itself.

While HTTP version 1.0 technically doesn’t require any headers, browsers usually don’t work unless you supply at least the Content-Length header. It should be set to the number of bytes in the response body.

After all that, we know how to create the smallest possible valid HTTP response.

HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Length: 2

hi

Armed with this knowledge, it is now easy to write a Ruby server we can navigate to in our browser:

require 'socket'
server = TCPServer.new 3000
loop do
  socket = server.accept
  socket.write "HTTP/1.0 200 OK\r\n"
  socket.write "Content-Length: 2\r\n"
  socket.write "\r\n"
  socket.write "hi\n"
  socket.close
end

You can run this server on OS X by copying the code to the clipboard and then running pbpaste | ruby. That will start a server at http://localhost:3000 that you can then navigate to in your browser. You should see our message, “hi”!

Other than Content-Length, common repsonse headers include:

Content-Type, for distinguishing between text/plain, text/html, and application/json
Date, a timestamp telling when the server replied
Connection, to let the client know whether to close or keep-alive this connection
Server, the name of the server software that sent this reply
Set-Cookie, data for the client to send back to the server so the server knows who you are

All of these headers (and others besides) allow HTTP clients and servers to coordinate requests and responses in more and more complicated ways.

Use curl to experiement and check out response headers for yourself. Run curl -I on your favorite websites, and see what response headers they send. Discover the secrets of the internet.

Now that we have code for a working HTTP server, we’ll talk about how to serve HTML next.

André.Arko.net

Rails from the ground up: Status Codes & Headers