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Markus A.
Asked: 2016-08-21 23:21:37 +0800 CST

Returning HTTP status 204 for GET /generate_204 using uhttpd?

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To deal with the Android captive portal detection for my specific setup, I need to return an HTTP status code 204 whenever I get a GET request for /generate_204. I currently use uhttpd as my webserver, so I'm wondering whether this is possible to do with this server.

My current understanding: I need to write myself a CGI (or PHP or Lua) script that returns something like
Status: 204 No Result

The question I have is how I can configure uhttpd to forward requests to /generate_204 to CGI or PHP or Lua, since that neither has a prefix nor a file-extension that I can match for this purpose.

php cgi openwrt lua

1 Answers

  1. Unfortunately @HBruijn's quite clever idea of simply making /generate_204 a directory rather than a file and then using that as the cgi_prefix with an index.cgi-file inside it as the index_page, only works partly. When I open /generate_204 from the browser myself, it does exactly what I wanted, but only after first returning a redirect to /generate_204/, which the Android captive portal detection explicitly ignores. So, unfortunately this solution doesn't solve my problem.

    Here's the hack-job I've come up with that does seem to work:

    Simply don't have a /generate_204 file at all and instead create a CGI-script in cgi-bin that handles all erroneous requests that looks like this:

    #!/bin/sh
if [ "$REQUEST_URI" == "/generate_204" ]; then
    echo "Status: 204 No Content"
    echo ""
    exit
fi

echo "Status: 404 Not Found"
echo "Content-Type: text/html"
echo ""
cat /path/to/my/error404.html

    Then simply add the following to /etc/config/uhttpd:

    option error_page  /cgi-bin/error.cgi
option cgi_prefix  /cgi-bin
list   interpreter ".cgi=/bin/ash"

    (adjusting file and folder names as needed)

    This is definitely not the cleanest solution, and in case there's a way to prevent the redirect and make @HBruijn's idea work, I'll leave the question open for now, since I'd much prefer that.

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