http server respond with inappropriate default headers for HEAD method

Version: >= 10.x
Platform: any
Subsystem: http

To implement a HTTP keep alive mechanism, I use the http.Agent({ keepAlive: true }) and http.request({ agent, method, host, port }).

Everything is ok when the method is GET or TRACE and others, the agent reuse the TCP connection as I expect.

But when changing the method to HEAD, the agent close the connection when server responded.

From the response header, the only different is that: for HEAD method, there isn't a Content-Length: 0 or Transfer-Encoding: chunked in the default header (but GET has by default), so the HTTP parser think this connection should not be kept alive.

But from the RFC, we can infer that if keep-alive was enabled, either Content-Length: 0 or Transfer-Encoding: chunked should be setted in response header, I think this should be a default behavior.

# server
const http = require("http")

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
  // res.setHeader("Content-Length", 0)
  // res.setHeader("Transfer-Encoding", "chunked")
  res.end()
})

server.keepAliveTimeout = 0
server.listen(2333, "x.x.x.x")

# client
const http = require("http")

const agent = new http.Agent({
  keepAlive: true,
})

request = () => {
  const req = http.request({
    agent,
    host: "x.x.x.x",
    port: 2333,
    method: 'HEAD',
  })

  req.end()
}

request()

@abbshr

Hey @abbshr
In contrary to GET this is the intended behavior for the HEAD requests as its simply a meta request of GET, excluding the body contents that you would typically have in GET, this seems like an expected behavior from the http server as there is no buffer or chunk to expect.
RFC-accordingly, depending on the request payload this may also lead to early termination.
Did i understand your problem correctly?
Also see the semantics of the HTTP payload https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-3.3

http: make HEAD method to work with keep-alive

It seems this issue should be reopened because the bugfix commit was reverted.

Hey! Can I work on this?

http: include Content-Length in HEAD responses for keep-alive

This issue has been marked as stale due to 210 days of inactivity.
It will be automatically closed in 30 days if no further activity occurs. If this is still relevant, please leave a comment or update it to keep it open.

This issue has been automatically closed after 30 days of inactivity following its stale status (no activity for a total of 120 days).
If this is still relevant, feel free to reopen it or leave a comment with additional details so we can continue the discussion.

Navigation Menu

Repository navigation

http server respond with inappropriate default headers for `HEAD` method #28438

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

http server respond with inappropriate default headers for HEAD method #28438

Description

Activity

jimmiehansson commented on Jun 29, 2019

wa-Nadoo commented on Jun 15, 2021

nawed2611 commented on May 6, 2022

github-actions commented on Jun 27, 2026

github-actions commented on Jul 28, 2026

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions

http server respond with inappropriate default headers for `HEAD` method #28438