How do I make php page return a 503 error (or anything non-200)

Question

A former developer wrote or client-server api in PHP. It simply sends messages as xml using post/response in a very simplistic fashion. The problem is that even when there is an error (ex: invalid arguments passed into the server side) we get a HTTP 200 response with a page like this

<h4>Unknown error!</h4>

In firebug I can see that the actually HTTP response is a 200. How can we send a different response (ie:503) when we programatically detect in our php code that it is appropriate to do so.

score 94 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

94

Use PHP's header function to send the code (along with the HTTP version and any other headers you need). More complete info:

When to send HTTP status code?

http://php.net/manual/en/function.header.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes

header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Status: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');
header('Retry-After: 300');//300 seconds

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

1
1

answered May 03 '10 at 20:15

ssube

47,010
7
103
140

9

Why do you hard code the HTTP/1.1 assumption in? What happens if the client is using HTTP 1.0 ? – Pacerier Jul 14 '13 at 14:08
1

@Pacerier so what would you do insead? How would I write this so that it covers both HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1? All the examples show it as given in the answer – Inigo Mar 04 '15 at 20:49
2

I guess `header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] . ' 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable');` ? – Inigo Mar 04 '15 at 20:49
3

I guess in PHP you could write it like this: `$protocol = "HTTP/1.0"; if ( "HTTP/1.1" == $_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"] ) $protocol = "HTTP/1.1"; header( "$protocol 503 Service Unavailable", true, 503 ); header( "Retry-After: 3600" );` source: https://yoast.com/http-503-site-maintenance-seo/ – Axel Mar 06 '15 at 20:11
"The difference between HTTP 1.0 and HTTP 1.1 is that In To signify successful requests and to identify transmission problems, HTTP 1.0 Status codes were utilized. HTTP/1.1 supports chunk transfers, which enabled material to be streamed in chunks and extra headers to be delivered after the message body." – Avatar Feb 01 '22 at 13:27

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 28 '14 at 22:13

I worked on a site that had been hacked and had to use HTACCESS to do this.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

 RewriteEngine on

 # let this (iescaped) IP address see the real site:
 # RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !^123.45.67.89

 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/maintenance.php$ [NC]

 RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.(jpe?g?|png|gif|css|js) [NC]

 RewriteRule .* /maintenance.php [R=503,L]

</IfModule>

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 03 '10 at 20:15

2

On top of your script (or really, before any output is sent as a response):

<?php header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); or any other HTTP status code.

answered May 03 '10 at 20:15

chelmertz

20,399
5
40
46

5

This relies on PHP's ability to map the status code from the header type (special-case handling) - it really should be header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found", true, 404) – symcbean May 05 '10 at 13:18
@symcbean Nice, I've never noticed that. Thanks! – chelmertz May 05 '10 at 17:39

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 03 '10 at 20:17

0

A good class for achieving this can be found here: http://www.krisjordan.com/php-class-for-http-response-status-codes/ - use it like this (before any other output):

<?php header(StatusCodes::httpHeaderFor(503)); ?>

answered May 03 '10 at 20:17

Chris

6,568
3
22
21

2

It is better to use something like `symfony/http-foundation` https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_foundation.html – LONGMAN Feb 24 '18 at 19:35

How do I make php page return a 503 error (or anything non-200)

4 Answers4

Linked