PHP Not Setting HTTP Status Code

Question

I need to respond to a HEAD request with status code 204.

<?php
if($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']=='HEAD') { 
    ob_clean();
    setHeaderStatus(204, true);
    // other headers 
    header('X-Other-123: 123');
    header('Location: '.sprintf('%s://%s%s', $_SERVER['REQUEST_SCHEME'],
    $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']));
    header('Date: '.date('r'));
    header('Content-Type: text/html', true);
    header('Content-Length: 0', true);
    flush();
    die;
}
$messages = array( // {{{ 
    // ...
    204 => '204 No Content',
    // ...
);

function setHeaderStatus($status, $replace = true)
{
    Global $messages;
    if (headers_sent() === true)
        return;

    if (strpos(PHP_SAPI, 'cgi') === 0) {
        header('Status: '.$messages[$status], $replace);
    } else {
        header($_SERVER["SERVER_PROTOCOL"].' '.$messages[$status], $replace);
    }
}

Testing this with cURL:

curl -i --noproxy 127.0.0.1 -X HEAD http://localhost/test.php

results in:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2014 07:46:27 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.4 (Win32) OpenSSL/0.9.8y PHP/5.4.19
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.19
X-Other-123: 123
Location: http://localhost/test.php
Content-Type: text/html

So it seems Apache overrides the status code set by PHP?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Try setHeaderStatus(204, true); after header('Location:... .

Normally header('Location:...' will automatic change header status to 301 or 302 to redirect. May be it override your setting.

Answer 2

Solved.

As the PHP manual says:

"The second special case is the "Location:" header. Not only does it send this header back to the browser, but it also returns a REDIRECT (302) status code to the browser unless the 201 or a 3xx status code has already been set."

As I set the 204 code, it was always overridden by the Location header to 302.

What finally solves it is:

header('Location: ...', true, 204 )