200 Response without body and content-type

[bunny-therapist]

How can I make an endpoint return a Response without a body and without a content-type? Returning None from the route handler just gets me "application/json" media type with null as the body. I have looked in the documentation but I can't find anything.

[guacs]

@bunny-therapist setting the status code to 204 should work.

from litestar import get
from litestar.app import Litestar
from litestar.enums import MediaType
from litestar.testing import create_test_client
from http import HTTPStatus


@get("/", status_code=HTTPStatus.NO_CONTENT)
async def handler() -> None:
    return None


with create_test_client([handler]) as client:
    resp = client.get("/")
    header = resp.headers

    assert "content-type" not in resp.headers
    assert resp.num_bytes_downloaded == 0

[provinzkraut]

"200 without a body" isn't really a thing. As @guacs said, if you truly want to omit the body, you should use a 204 code. However, if you're fine with sending an empty body, you could just do something like

@get("/")
async def handler() -> str:
    return ""

which sends an empty plaintext response.

[guacs]

This will set the content type as text though.

[bunny-therapist]

I understand. The only reason I am trying to return 200 without a body is because I am trying to replace existing code. I am currently investigating if 204 would work as well (it should, but you never know).

[provinzkraut]

@bunny-therapist What I'm trying to say is: The example I posted should result in the same bytes being sent over the wire as omitting a body. When sending an ASGI response to the server, you have to send at least one "body" event, even if it's an empty string (b""), which sending that empty string directly is effectively the same as returning None, so your client would see the same body in the end. The only difference is that you'll have to set a Content-Type. However, while technically valid, omitting this will result in most clients simply interpreting the result as text/plain anyway.

---

Returning empty string

< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:09:53 GMT
< server: uvicorn
< content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
< content-length: 0
< 

Returning None

< HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
< date: Mon, 12 Feb 2024 15:10:01 GMT
< server: uvicorn
< 

As you can see, the received response body is the same. The only difference is in the headers.