How to access request's raw_header: HTTP hdr sent by browser

Rails
1

Is that something possible, i’ve been trying to get to the RAW headers
sent during a GET request on a page, and couldn’t find where. I’m using
webrick.

Here are the tries I did to get access to it:

class ZController < ApplicationController
def info
#render :inline => request.inspect
#render :inline => raw_header.inspect
#render :inline => request_line.inspect
#render :inline => req.inspect
#render :inline => meta.inspect
#render :inline => header.inspect
#render :inline => headers.inspect # --> response headers
#render :inline => $:.inspect
#render :inline => $*.inspect
#render :inline => $".inspect
#render :inline => @request.inspect
render :inline => inspect
end
end

In the scope of the controller, I can’t find such info. It seems it
could be very useful but it would somewhat be corrupting the neat
dependency on the CGI convention. I don’t care too much about this, if
it requires some tweaking of webrick or RoR, it’s ok, but I would need
to know what the simplest way.
Thanks

2

Philippe L. wrote:

Is that something possible, i’ve been trying to get to the RAW headers
sent during a GET request on a page, and couldn’t find where. I’m using
webrick.
I forgot to explain what is really RAW:
it’s not request.env[]

it’s something that must look like:
GET /Z/index HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:3000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10)
Gecko/20050911 Firefox/1.0.6 (Debian package 1.0.6-5)
Accept:
text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,/;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: _session_id=049d26a05baf3d6048b153c50e29fed3
Cache-Control: max-age=0

3

Rails runs in a CGI environment, where the Webserver provides
various information with environment vars (and strips the headers
from the request).

For example, take FastCGI processes running seperately from the
Webserver,
where the Webserver just calls them. Rails never gets to see raw
headers in the
first place. (with FastCGI the enviroment vars are part of the
FastCGI protocol).

So, you have to stick to request.env, no raw headers here.

For more on how the CGI protocol handles HTTP headers, look here:
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/env.html

For a typical FastCGI call, see the first example here:
http://www.fastcgi.com/devkit/doc/fcgi-spec.html#SB
(notice how FCGI_PARAMS contains the stuff you’ll find in request.env,
and FCGI_STDIN contains nothing (it would only contain POST data, no
headers)).

-Thomas

Am 22.12.2005 um 02:34 schrieb Philippe L.:

4

Thomas F. wrote:

Rails runs in a CGI environment, where the Webserver provides
various information with environment vars (and strips the headers
from the request).
[…]

So, you have to stick to request.env, no raw headers here.

Except if I can stick to Webrick and do something custom for Webrick.
My question is, if I want to do that, what’s the best way?
Can I create a do_GET handler for Webrick which still allows me to use
the rest of rails with no problems?
I wouldn’t like it to be a quick hack but an extensible mechanism to
blend in raw servlets and usual rails development.

Thus, where should I modify my Webrick/actionpack scripts to insert
this?

Thanks,
Philippe.