How a user-agent can discover the allowable methods

Allow

Preliminaries

This note describes how a user-agent can discover the allowable methods, and how the server responds to methods it can not handle.

Each server resource can be accessed with one or more of the following methods: HEAD, GET, PUT, DELETE, POST, PATCH, OPTIONS and TRACE.

The HTTP specification provides a mechanism for a user agent to discover which of these methods are allowed on a particular resource through the OPTIONS method.

As an example, if the user agent wants to discover which methods are available for the resource at https://example.com/customer/names, an OPTIONS request can be sent to that URL, and the response will contain an allow header listing the available methods, which may look like:

allow: HEAD,GET,OPTIONS

Normally, the list of allowable methods returned in the allow header is the list of methods configured by the webmaster in the methods entry. But not always. When the RBAC Module is enabled, access to resources is restricted on a path-pattern basis. Each path-pattern specifies a list of allowable methods and the roles that are permitted to use those methods. An OPTIONS request in this circumstance may return a smaller set of allowable methods.

Server Options

If a user agent wants to query the server for the list of allowable methods, without limiting it to a resource path, a bare '*' may be issued to the server like this https://example.com/*. The server will respond with an allow header equivalent to the values configured by the webmaster in the methods entry.

Response code 405

Whenever any request method — other than OPTIONS — cannot be fulfilled, the server returns status code 405 with an allow header listing the methods that are allowed. When the OPTIONS methods itself is not enabled by the webmaster, the response will have status code 405 and no allow response header will be present.

Configuration

There are no special configuration settings for the allow header. Its behavior is defined by IETF RFC 7231 HTTP/1.1 Semantics and Content Section 7.4.1.

Review

Key points to remember:

  • The OPTIONS method should be included in the methods entry of every production server.
  • The allow response header lists the methods allowed on a particular resource.
  • The RBAC module may limit the methods allowed on a resource.
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How a user-agent can discover the allowable methods

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