You can put anything in your dialog box
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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HTTP 200
{"status": "success", "payload": "{\"error\": true}"}
Ah, the 200 Go Fuck Yourself pattern.
I use HTTP error codes in my API, and still occasionally see a GET /resource/{"error":"invalid branchID provided"} from people who don't seem to know what they are.
I know an architect who designs APIs this way. Also includes a status code in the response object because why have one status code when you can have two, potentially contradictory, status codes?
I inherited a project where it was essentially impossible to get anything other than 200 OK. Trying to use a private endpoint without logging in? 200 OK unauthorized. Sent gibberish instead of actual request body format? 200 OK bad request. Database connection down? You get the point...
It's the HTTP version of "great job."
Computer version of dude wincing through the pain, tears in eyes, giving you a thumbs up.
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I may have run in your acquaintance work, stuff along the lines of
200 OK
{ error_code: s23, error_msg: "An error was encountered when performing the operation" }
If you happen to run into him, kindly tackle him in the groin for me.
Thanks!
Well, looking at your example, I think a good case can even be made for it.
“s23” doesn’t look like an HTTP status code, so including it can make total sense. After all, there’s plenty of reasons why you could want custom error codes that don’t really align with HTTP codes, and customised error messages are also a sensible use case for that.
Of course duplicating the actual HTTP status code in your body is just silly. And if you use custom error codes, it often still makes sense to use the closest matching HTTP status code in addition to it (so yeah, I agree the 200 in your example doesn’t make a lot of sense). But neither of those preclude good reasons for custom codes.
Still, 200 should not be returned. If you have your own codes, just return 500 alongside that custom code.
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Lmao do they work at Oracle???
When I used to work at Oracle every so often a customer would call and complain some function was throwing error "ORA-00000 normal successful completion" and they wanted it filing as a bug and for us to fix it.
I was never quite sure how we were supposed to fix stupid.
Ugh this just reminded me that I ran into this exact issue a couple years ago. We were running jobs every hour to ingest data from an API into our data warehouse. Eventually we got reports from users about having gaps in our data. We dug into it for days trying to find a pattern, but couldn't pinpoint anything. We were just missing random pieces of data, but our jobs never reported any failures.
Eventually we were able to determine the issue. HTTP 200 with "error: true" in the response. Fml
I've seen the status code in a JSON response before: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/json_api/v1/status-codes#401-unauthorized
One reason I can think of for including it is that it may make it easier for the consumer to check the status code if it's in the JSON. Depending on how many layers of abstraction you have, your app may not have access to the raw HTTP response.
Although, yeah you lose the single source of truth though.
Depending on how many layers of abstraction you have, your app may not have access to the raw HTTP response.
That sounds like either over-abstraction or bad abstraction then
Yea, I don't really see a scenario where you are both, making http requests (and therefore care about http responses), and also not able to see the response.
If you are using some wrapper client for an API, you wouldn't be dealing with the response anyway so it being in json isn't particularly helpful
And no error message...
I guess that's how it's done. Yeah.
This is always how graphql works :)
Getting only a message with no error indicator isn’t much better either
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This became a religious war at my last role.
I had a similar one at a past work too. A test which was asserting a response status 500.
Like, instead of the test asserting the correct error/status code was being returned, it was instead asserting any error would simply getting masked as a 500.
Basically, asserting the code was buggy....
That made me angry a couple of times but I still miss that place sometimes.
At a prior job, our ~~API~~ load balancers would swallow all errors and return an HTTP 200 response with no content. It was because we had one or two clients with shitty integrations that couldn't handle anything but 200. Of course, they brought in enough money that we couldn't ever force them to fix it on their end.
I once worked on a project where the main function would run the entire code in a try-catch block. The catch block did nothing. Just returned 200 OK. Didn't even log the error anywhere. Never seen anything so incredibly frustrating to work on.
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Several Favicon APIs do this. Even Google's Favicon endpoint does it, because they return a fallback image. It's pretty annoying.
Welcome to graphQL. The REST abstraction few need, but everyone wants for some reason.
My team recently migrated to graphql and they don't even do it right. The graphql layer still makes REST calls and then translates them to a gql format, so not only do we get no time or computing savings, we also get the bullshit errors
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Here I am preferring 200, with success boolean / message string...
Iike HTTP errors codes for real fuck up's, if I see 500 somethings fucked in the app, otherwise a standardised json response body seems way easier
What about both? User supplies bad input? HTTP 400 with response body json describing the error in a standard format?
when you are too lazy to ask your request library to not throw exception on non-200 responses.
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Someone GraphQLs
I always loved how Sierra took its error message and turned it into an intentionally quitting the game message because every time they closed the game, instead of closing properly it crashed.
I've got better news:
- notice 200 error:true story on our side
- fix it
- fix it better: add detailed description, add message on what needs to be done on client side
Client to mutual users: meh, we see an error, not our problem. Me: screams in swear language
me with gRPC error codes: nil, parameter error, app error -- OK, you fucked up, we fucked up. Edit: forgot NotFound.
I really should read about the various ones that exist at some point, but I've always got bigger fires to put out.
Edit, since it seems unclear, gRPC != HTTP and does not use the same status codes. I meant that I felt like I was using fewer than I should, though I just checked and basically not.
This is basically the difference between HTTP 4xx and 5xx error codes. 4xx means the client did something wrong (invalid request, tried to load something that doesn't exist, doesn't have access), whereas 5xx means the request was OK but something broke on the server.
Yeah, I know how http status codes work. I just followed the existing pattern at my current place with gRPC and this post made me realize I don't know most gRPC error codes and best practices.
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