PHP (Apache) silently converting HTTP 429 and others to 500

Question

I just discovered an oddity in PHP\'s header() method silently converting some of my statuses to 500. Since I had no luck in finding mention of this behavior in various web

Answer 1

It's perhaps your SAPI configuraiton. Last time I tested something similar, the conclusion looked like this:

<?php
header('HTTP/ 429 Too Many Requests', false, 429);
echo "Too Many Requests\n";

Which in your case works still well for me (Apache 2.2 / FCGI / Windows):

>curl -i "http://local.example.com/header-test.php"
HTTP/1.1 429 Too Many Requests
Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 23:49:09 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Win32) mod_fcgid/2.3.6
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.13
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html

Too Many Requests

Answer 2

It's Apache, 99% sure, I can't find it direcly in it's docs, but I can infer it from the test below (Apache version 2.2.22)

Add this in your config:

ErrorDocument 429 Aaargh to heavy

Restart:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Syntax error on line 6 of /etc/apache2/conf.d/localized-error-pages:
Unsupported HTTP response code 429
Action 'configtest' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
   ...fail!

429 also seems a recent addition in rfc6585, status: proposed, date: April 2012. One year old for HTTP RFCs is... just a baby in my experience. Add to that the process of getting it in Apache, and then in your package repositories... Well, you could try Apache 2.4...