HTTP response

An HTTP response looks very much like an HTTP request. Both are called HTTP
messages. Let's consider this HTTP response :

Line Contents
number
1 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
2 Content-length: 350
3 Content-Type: text/html

As a special case, HTTP supports so called "Informational responses" as status
codes 1xx. These messages are special in that they don't convey any part of the
response, they're just used as sort of a signaling message to ask a client to
continue to post its request for instance. In the case of a status 100 response
the requested information will be carried by the next non-100 response message
following the informational one. This implies that multiple responses may be
sent to a single request, and that this only works when keep-alive is enabled
(1xx messages are HTTP/1.1 only). HAProxy handles these messages and is able to
correctly forward and skip them, and only process the next non-100 response. As
such, these messages are neither logged nor transformed, unless explicitly
state otherwise. Status 101 messages indicate that the protocol is changing
over the same connection and that haproxy must switch to tunnel mode, just as
if a CONNECT had occurred. Then the Upgrade header would contain additional
information about the type of protocol the connection is switching to.

1.3.1. The Response line

Line 1 is the "response line". It is always composed of 3 fields :

• a version tag : HTTP/1.1
• a status code : 200
• a reason : OK

The status code is always 3-digit. The first digit indicates a general status :

• 1xx = informational message to be skipped (eg: 100, 101)
• 2xx = OK, content is following (eg: 200, 206)
• 3xx = OK, no content following (eg: 302, 304)
• 4xx = error caused by the client (eg: 401, 403, 404)
• 5xx = error caused by the server (eg: 500, 502, 503)

Please refer to RFC2616 for the detailed meaning of all such codes. The
"reason" field is just a hint, but is not parsed by clients. Anything can be
found there, but it's a common practice to respect the well-established
messages. It can be composed of one or multiple words, such as "OK", "Found",
or "Authentication Required".

Haproxy may emit the following status codes by itself :

Code  When / reason  
   200  access to stats page, and when replying to monitoring requests  
   301  when performing a redirection, depending on the configured code  
   302  when performing a redirection, depending on the configured code  
   303  when performing a redirection, depending on the configured code  
   307  when performing a redirection, depending on the configured code  
   308  when performing a redirection, depending on the configured code  
   400  for an invalid or too large request  
   401  when an authentication is required to perform the action \(when  
        accessing the stats page\)  
   403  when a request is forbidden by a "block" ACL or "reqdeny" filter  
   408  when the request timeout strikes before the request is complete  
   500  when haproxy encounters an unrecoverable internal error, such as a  
        memory allocation failure, which should never happen  
   502  when the server returns an empty, invalid or incomplete response, or  
        when an "rspdeny" filter blocks the response.  
   503  when no server was available to handle the request, or in response to  
        monitoring requests which match the "monitor fail" condition  
   504  when the response timeout strikes before the server responds

The error 4xx and 5xx codes above may be customized (see "errorloc" in section
4.2).

1.3.2. The response headers

Response headers work exactly like request headers, and as such, HAProxy uses
the same parsing function for both. Please refer to paragraph 1.2.2 for more
details.