Return 204 instead 200 for empty file

[drnextgis]

I'm using express for publishing static files and faced with an error which reported by one of the client libraries:

Error: http status 200 returned without content.

What is the right way to cope with this issue. It looks like I have to handle such cases manually?

[dougwilson]

I'm not sure, there isn't enough information here. A 200 is perfectly valid to have a zero length response and a 204 is for completing actions (i.e. PUT POST, etc).

[drnextgis]

Thanks for response. It seems like this requirement of Mapbox GL JS library is not commonly used and we have to adapt our own backend application alongside with many other users who interract with this library: for example faradayio/tilesplash#37

[dougwilson]

Yea, but I guess I'm asking what does your Express code look like? There are so many different ways to respond, it's not clesr to me which methods you are using and with what values and what you're expecting the response to look like.

[drnextgis]

It is simplest backend for testing purposes. And what I do is only:

var app = express();
app.use('/', express.static(path.join(__dirname, '..')));

[dougwilson]

I assume you have some files in there that are zero length? The way static works is that it will serve the response under whatever status code you want. Node.js defaults to 200 so that is why you get 200. If you wanted to serve a file as your 500 or 404 response, etc just set that status code on the response and your file will be served as that.

[drnextgis]

Ok, I got your point. Thanks!