HTTP status as a service

Using Node.js* you can run a simple “HTTP status as a service” server. This can be useful for quickly checking whether your application handles various status codes.

var http = require('http');

http.createServer(function (request, response) {
  var status = request.url.substr(1);

  if ( ! http.STATUS_CODES[status]) {
    status = '404';
  }

  response.writeHead(status, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });
  response.end(http.STATUS_CODES[status]);
}).listen(process.env.PORT || 5000);

This will create a server on port 5000, or any port that you specify in the PORT environment variable. It will respond to /{CODE} and return the HTTP status that corresponds to {CODE}. Here’s a couple of examples:

$ curl -i http://127.0.0.1:5000/500
HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error
Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:10:10 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Internal Server Error%

$ curl -i http://127.0.0.1:5000/404
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Content-Type: text/plain
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 14:10:32 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

Not Found%

This is a really simple example, and could easily be extended to let you specify a Location header value for 30X responses.

*Well, you could use anything really. I’m just using Node.js since JavaScript is my language of choice.