iisnode 401 message returns iis page

Question

I am building an application for which i am using nodejs express to do rest api services. I hosted that application on windows server 2012 using iisnode module.Everything works perfect. The issue is that when i am returning 404(unauthorized) message from node application the end point is recieving the 401 http status with the error page of iis. Is there any other way to overcome this issue.

here is my webconfig file

<!-- indicates that the hello.js file is a node.js application 
to be handled by the iisnode module -->

<handlers>
  <add name="iisnode" path="app.js" verb="*" modules="iisnode" />
</handlers>

<!-- use URL rewriting to redirect the entire branch of the URL namespace
to hello.js node.js application; for example, the following URLs will 
all be handled by hello.js:
    http://localhost/node/express/myapp/foo
    http://localhost/node/express/myapp/bar
-->
<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <rule name="/">
      <match url="/*" />
      <action type="Rewrite" url="app.js" />
    </rule>
  </rules>
</rewrite>

My code in nodejs app is the following

 if(clienttoken!=servertoken)
{
    res.json(401, 'unauthorized');
    res.end();
}

Thanks in advance

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 03 '16 at 00:15

Using IIS, if you want to return the errors straight from your Node app to the requester without IIS intercepting them with default Error Pages, use the <httpErrors> element with the existingResponse attribute set to PassThrough

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" />
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 20 '16 at 20:57

IIS is obscuring the "detail" of the error (your json response) because by default errors are set to DetailedLocalOnly, meaning that the error detail will be shown for requests from the machine the website is running on, but show the generic IIS error page for that error code for any external requests.

Setting the 401 error to Detailed instead should allow your json response through:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <httpErrors errorMode="DetailedLocalOnly">
      <remove statusCode="401" />
      <error statusCode="401" errorMode="Detailed"/>
    </httpErrors>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

See https://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/httperrors for details.

Hi tom.Thanks for your support.,I tried the above one.But i am getting internal server error — M14, Oct 24 '16 at 12:31
Hmm, I don't have access to my iis server at the moment. I adapted that example from the documentation page I linked, so maybe have a read through that — Tom Jardine-McNamara, Oct 24 '16 at 22:05

iisnode 401 message returns iis page

2 Answers2