Goliath cannot handle "Expect: 100-Continue"

[maxlinc]

This was discussed on the mailing list but I didn't see an issue and it appears unresolved.

The proposed workaround doesn't work. It appeared to at first, but only because curl sends the body after a timeout.

[igrigorik]

Curl will always wait for 100-continue. To remove it use: -H'Expect:' when sending the request.

That said, the response you linked to also looks correct. See RFC: http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#rfc.section.10.1

This class of status code indicates a provisional response, consisting only of the Status-Line and optional headers, and is terminated by an empty line. There are no required headers for this class of status code.

[maxlinc]

Thanks for the quick reply. I've tested with multiple different clients (libcurl based, Apache HTTP, .NET, etc). libcurl is actually the most forgiving of broken 100-continue support, and only results in a 1s delay before sending the body. Many other clients fail after a timeout, without ever sending the request body.

I think that curl can show there is still an issue, though. I think you're right it is a valid response, but it's coming too late. Try changing the response from a 100 Continue to a 417 Expectation Failed. That should cause curl to abort the request, but curl it doesn't. I compared the Goliath behavior with that of this Unicorn/Sinatra solution. I found that the Unicorn/Sinatra solution worked as I expected for either 100 or 417, but Goliath didn't. Implementing it in on_headers doesn't work for the 417. I also tried the same middleware from the Unicorn/Sinatra solution, and found that Goliath hung on the second request.

I commented on the gist to keep the code samples in one spot, and to link the mailing list/gist to this issue.

Final note: Unfortunately properly implementing 100 Continue support is probably non-trivial. I found the Use of the 100 (Continue) Status section of the RFC 2616, which includes 5 requirements for HTTP 1.1 origin servers, and 4 requirements for HTTP 1.1 proxies.