HTTP HEAD considerations

[dustinmoris]

A few things which I'm trying to get clarity on:

• Should Giraffe have a handler like verbs [ GET, HEAD ] >=>?
• Should Giraffe's GET handler also handle HEAD requests?
• Should Giraffe's response writers (e.g. json, htmlFile, etc.) check if a request is a HEAD and only write to the response body if it isn't a HEAD?
• Is there a scenario where someone would want to serve a HTTP GET request but not serve the same request via HEAD?

Would love to get some input on how current Giraffe users feel about this!

[dustinmoris]

Should Giraffe's response writers (e.g. json, htmlFile, etc.) check if a request is a HEAD and only write to the response body if it isn't a HEAD?

Not required. A HEAD response should never contain a body, but this seems to be already handled by ASP.NET Core.

[dustinmoris]

Should Giraffe have a handler like verbs [ GET, HEAD ] >=>?

This is already done: choose [ HEAD; GET ] works just fine.

[cmeeren]

I am surprised and very happy to learn that this is so trivial to implement. I suggest two very simple changes:

1. Add a note about this to the documentation (not sure where it would fit; you probably have a better idea than me.)

2. Add a GETH handler that is simply defined as choose [ GET; HEAD ]. Yes, it's so trivial that people can easily define it themselves, but if we define it in the library, there's one standard handler to support combined GET/HEAD endpoints, and Giraffe codebases will be more standardized when it comes to supporting both GET and HEAD requests for an endpoint. And of course, being so trivial there's no extra maintenance on your part.

[dustinmoris]

@cmeeren: Coming in the next version: ea9054d