Setting custom HTTP status code messages in nginx

I think it would be funny if my web application that is hosted using an nginx reverse proxy (proxy_pass) returned something like 200 Could Be Worse rather than 200 OK, when the page load was successful.

I know that there is a return 200 "message"; command, but when I just add that to my site config file, the rest of the response is not returned but just the message portion. I tried adding a \n at the end, as I read somewhere, but it didn't change anything.

Also, a possible issue with this approach is that, as far as I can tell, it would always return "200 Could Be Worse", even if it should respond with something like 404 or 500.

I thought about adding an error_page rule, but if I add that for a 200 status code, nginx config validation fails with the following error message:

nginx: [emerg] value "200" must be between 300 and 599 in /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/[site-name]:8
nginx: configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test failed

So, how do I make my http status messages more fun in nginx?

posted about 20 hours ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

luap42‭ staff

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