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Accepted
Sparsh Gupta
Asked: 2011-10-12 05:15:41 +0800 CST

nginx send blank 200 responses

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I'm configuring a failover server tasked to accept any incoming request, and reply with blank 200 response. The idea is to minimize the reply time and to ensure we dont send any 40x or 50x.

I tried using return 200; for the desired locations within Nginx, but my monitoring systems (Pingdom) didn't like the response, and consider the server not responding.

Is there a better way to do this, of course with minimal overhead on the server?

http nginx

2 Answers

  1. You can have nginx return back an empty HTTP 200 by a config block like:

    location = /health {
  return 200;
  #access_log off;
}

    You can uncomment the access_log line if you dont want all those health checks to be logged.

    • 34
  2. Best Answer

    HTTP status code 204 No Content is meant to say "I've completed the request, but there is no body to return":

    10.2.5 204 No Content

    The server has fulfilled the request but does not need to return an entity-body, and might want to return updated metainformation. The response MAY include new or updated metainformation in the form of entity-headers, which if present SHOULD be associated with the requested variant.

    If the client is a user agent, it SHOULD NOT change its document view from that which caused the request to be sent. This response is primarily intended to allow input for actions to take place without causing a change to the user agent's active document view, although any new or updated metainformation SHOULD be applied to the document currently in the user agent's active view.

    The 204 response MUST NOT include a message-body, and thus is always terminated by the first empty line after the header fields.

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