summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/broken_clients/index.html
blob: edf0b1ff1628eda9e62ebc1025b887f33ffcea0d (plain) (blame)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <meta name="description" content="">
    <meta name="author" content="Loïc Hoguin based on a design from (Soft10) Pol Cámara">

    <meta name="generator" content="Hugo 0.17" />

    <title>Nine Nines: Dealing with broken clients</title>

    <link href='https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:400,700,400italic' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'>
    <link href="/css/99s.css" rel="stylesheet">

    <link rel="shortcut icon" href="/img/ico/favicon.ico">
    <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="114x114" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-114.png">
    <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" sizes="72x72" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-72.png">
    <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="/img/ico/apple-touch-icon-57.png">

    
</head>


<body class="">
  <header id="page-head">
    <div id="topbar" class="container">
        <div class="row">
          <div class="span2">
            <h1 id="logo"><a href="/" title="99s">99s</a></h1>
          </div>
          <div class="span10">
            
            <div id="side-header">
              <nav>
                <ul>
                  <li><a title="Hear my thoughts" href="/articles">Articles</a></li>
  				  <li><a title="Watch my talks" href="/talks">Talks</a></li>
  				  <li class="active"><a title="Read the docs" href="/docs">Documentation</a></li>
  				  <li><a title="Request my services" href="/services">Consulting & Training</a></li>
                </ul>
              </nav> 
              <ul id="social">
                <li>
                  <a href="https://github.com/ninenines" title="Check my Github repositories"><img src="/img/ico_github.png" data-hover="/img/ico_github_alt.png" alt="Github"></a>
                </li>
                    <li>
						<a title="Keep in touch!" href="http://twitter.com/lhoguin"><img src="/img/ico_microblog.png" data-hover="/img/ico_microblog_alt.png"></a>
					</li>
                    <li>
						<a title="Contact me" href="mailto:[email protected]"><img src="/img/ico_mail.png" data-hover="/img/ico_mail_alt.png"></a>
					</li>
              </ul>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
    </div>


</header>

<div id="contents" class="two_col">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div id="docs" class="span9 maincol">

<h1 class="lined-header"><span>Dealing with broken clients</span></h1>

<div class="paragraph"><p>There exists a very large number of implementations for the
HTTP protocol. Most widely used clients, like browsers,
follow the standard quite well, but others may not. In
particular custom enterprise clients tend to be very badly
written.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy tries to follow the standard as much as possible,
but is not trying to handle every possible special cases.
Instead Cowboy focuses on the cases reported in the wild,
on the public Web.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>That means clients that ignore the HTTP standard completely
may fail to understand Cowboy&#8217;s responses. There are of
course workarounds. This chapter aims to cover them.</p></div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_lowercase_headers">Lowercase headers</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Cowboy converts all headers it receives to lowercase, and
similarly sends back headers all in lowercase. Some broken
HTTP clients have issues with that.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>A simple way to solve this is to create an <code>onresponse</code> hook
that will format the header names with the expected case.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">capitalize_hook</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Status</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Headers</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Body</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Req</span>) <span style="color: #990000">-&gt;</span>
    <span style="color: #009900">Headers2</span> <span style="color: #990000">=</span> [{<span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">cowboy_bstr:capitalize_token</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">N</span>), <span style="color: #009900">V</span>}
        || {<span style="color: #009900">N</span>, <span style="color: #009900">V</span>} <span style="color: #990000">&lt;-</span> <span style="color: #009900">Headers</span>],
    <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">cowboy_req:reply</span></span>(<span style="color: #009900">Status</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Headers2</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Body</span>, <span style="color: #009900">Req</span>)<span style="color: #990000">.</span></tt></pre></div></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>Note that HTTP/2 clients do not have that particular issue
because the specification explicitly says all headers are
lowercase, unlike HTTP which allows any case but treats
them as case insensitive.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_camel_case_headers">Camel-case headers</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sometimes it is desirable to keep the actual case used by
clients, for example when acting as a proxy between two broken
implementations. There is no easy solution for this other than
forking the project and editing the <code>cowboy_protocol</code> file
directly.</p></div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="sect1">
<h2 id="_chunked_transfer_encoding">Chunked transfer-encoding</h2>
<div class="sectionbody">
<div class="paragraph"><p>Sometimes an HTTP client advertises itself as HTTP/1.1 but
does not support chunked transfer-encoding. This is invalid
behavior, as HTTP/1.1 clients are required to support it.</p></div>
<div class="paragraph"><p>A simple workaround exists in these cases. By changing the
Req object response state to <code>waiting_stream</code>, Cowboy will
understand that it must use the identity transfer-encoding
when replying, just like if it was an HTTP/1.0 client.</p></div>
<div class="listingblock">
<div class="content"><!-- Generator: GNU source-highlight 3.1.8
by Lorenzo Bettini
http://www.lorenzobettini.it
http://www.gnu.org/software/src-highlite -->
<pre><tt><span style="color: #009900">Req2</span> <span style="color: #990000">=</span> <span style="font-weight: bold"><span style="color: #000000">cowboy_req:set</span></span>(<span style="color: #FF6600">resp_state</span>, <span style="color: #FF6600">waiting_stream</span>)<span style="color: #990000">.</span></tt></pre></div></div>
</div>
</div>



	
		
		

		<nav style="margin:1em 0">
			
				<a style="float:left" href="https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/architecture/">
					Architecture
				</a>
			

			
				<a style="float:right" href="https://ninenines.eu/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide/hooks/">
					Hooks
				</a>
			
		</nav>
	



</div>

<div class="span3 sidecol">


<h3>
	Cowboy
	2.0
	
	User Guide
</h3>

<ul>
	
		<li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide">User Guide</a></li>
	
	
		<li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/manual">Function Reference</a></li>
	
	
</ul>

<h4 id="docs-nav">Navigation</h4>

<h4>Version select</h4>
<ul>
	
	
	
		<li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/2.0/guide">2.0</a></li>
	
		<li><a href="/docs/en/cowboy/1.0/guide">1.0</a></li>
	
</ul>

</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

      <footer>
        <div class="container">
          <div class="row">
            <div class="span6">
              <p id="scroll-top"><a href="#">↑ Scroll to top</a></p>
              <nav>
                <ul>
                  <li><a href="mailto:[email protected]" title="Contact us">Contact us</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/ninenines/ninenines.github.io" title="Github repository">Contribute to this site</a></li>
                </ul>
              </nav>
            </div>
            <div class="span6 credits">
               <p><img src="/img/footer_logo.png"></p>
               <p>Copyright &copy; Loïc Hoguin 2012-2016</p>
            </div>
          </div>
        </div>
      </footer>

    
    <script src="/js/custom.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>