[cgiapp] Re: Best practices for returning 404/file-not-found pages inside and outside of mod_perl

[Mark Stosberg]

> > In the past, the way I returned 404 page through CGI::App was something 
> > like this:
> > 
> >   return $self->error(title => 'Page not found');
> > 
> > I learned that is too late to return a real 404 error running under CGI, 
> > so the page comes back with a 200 status code, which isn't quite right.
> > 
> > More recently, I learned that with mod_perl, I learned that I can get 
> > the system to return a true 404, so I updated the logic to do that when 
> > possible:
> > 
> >   if (exists $ENV{MOD_PERL}) {
> >     $self->header_add( -status => 404 );
> >     return '';
> >   }
> >   else {
> >      return $self->error(title => 'Page not found')
> >   }
> 
> 
> I recently ran into this myself, and discovered that setting the header_type 
> to 'redirect' fixed the issue:
> 
>     if (exists $ENV{MOD_PERL}) {
>       $self->header_add( -status => 404 );
>       return $self->redirect('/');
>     }

Good to know! Had you run into the "500/eof/chunk" error as well, before you
added the redirect?

The approach I settled on was to patch LWP to quit throwing that error, as
"real" browsers seem to deal with it OK. 

The other behavior I reported about "can't find modules" I think was a separate configuration issue in my case.

Thanks for the redirect tip, Rhesa!

    Mark
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