Apache HttpClient is throwng HTTP 500s but can't reproduce in a browser

Question

Using HttpClient 4.1.3, I've written the following code:

HttpClient httpClient = HttpClientFactory.newHttpClient();
HttpGet httpGet = new HttpGet("some/url/to/hit");
HttpResponse httpResp = httpClient.execute(httpGet);
int statusCode = httpResp.getStatusLine().getStatusCode();
if(statusCode != HttpStatus.SC_OK)
    throw new Exception(/* ... */);

That's getting HTTP 500 responses (as found in the httpResp.getStatusLine().getStatusCode()) from a particular URL and throwing the exception.

The thing is, when I go to the "failing" URL in a browser, its running perfectly fine.

So I ask:

• Could HttpClient be timing out, short-circuiting the request-response cycle, and just giving me an HTTP 500?
• What else could be going on here? How is it possible for HttpClient to be giving me 500s when the browser is displaying the page perfectly fine for the same exact URL?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I had the same problem. I could access a web site via the browser but when using the apache http client, I consistently got http 500 internal server error. The problem was the "Content-Type" GET Header. It had the value "multipart/related",which some servers don't seem to like. I changed it to "text/html" and it all worked fine.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I had the same problem accessing a spring xml based api. The problem solved by setting the accept header to xml and html.

httpGet.setHeader("Accept", "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;");