PHP Header location not working / no HTTP Status: change

Question

I'm facing a problem using Headers in PHP. header('location: http:google.com'); is not working. This is my code:

if(!headers_sent()){
    header("location: http://google.com");
    exit;
}

HTML Data...

Script is exiting but header() is not working.

I've already checked in my php.ini for output_buffer param and it's set to 4096.
There are not extra lines above PHP opening tag
and my script is encoding in UTF-8 w/o BOM.
All errors are enabled but I'm getting no errors/warnings/notices. What is happening?
Environment: PHP 7.0.27 and NGINX.

Later attempts and debugging steps concluded:

header("location: http://google.com";, true, 302); made no difference
header("Refresh: ...") did succeed.

HTTP response debugging (after being asked a couple of times):

StatusCode : 200 
StatusDescription : OK 
Content : <br />  <b>Notice</b>: Undefined index: HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE in ...
RawContent : HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Transfer-Encoding: chunked 
Connection: keep-alive 
Pragma: no-cache 
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate 
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8 
Date: Fri, 18 May 201... 
Forms : {} 
Headers : {[Transfer-Encoding, chunked], [Connection, keep-alive],

Unanswered still:

header("Status: 303 etc"); vs. header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently'); from the duplicate
State of cgi.rfc2616_headers
PHP SAPI
Running the sample code outside the phar.

Try putting Location instead of location. I think it's case sensitive. — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 03:27
`set_error_handler("var_dump");` and showcase the `wget -S` output for that test script. — mario, May 18 '18 at 03:27
@Mehdi I echoed a message within the if clause, and the message was displayed. That means that headers haven't been sent yet. — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 03:30
Go to the network tab in your browser and check the response headers — Spoody, May 18 '18 at 03:31
@mario Sorry, but could you explain the steps? I've put `set_error_handler("var_dump");` above `header()`. What should I do now? — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 03:34
@ProtectedVoid run "wget -S url-to-script" and it should get the output. — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 03:35
If no warning shows up, might indicate an NGINX and PHP-FCGI setup issue rather (nothing can be deduced from that code sample really). Hunt for either php or nginx logs. And run `wget -S http://localhost/yatestscript.php` on the console. — mario, May 18 '18 at 03:36
@XerShade My NGINX server is running locally in Windows. Is there `wget` equivalent I can try? — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 03:40
@ProtectedVoid If you are using powershell try this `$client = new-object System.Net.WebClient` `$client.DownloadFile("url","file.txt")` — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 03:43
Probable duplicate of https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8028957/how-to-fix-headers-already-sent-error-in-php and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4150717/with-nginx-php-fpm-location-header-sometimes-ignored-by-browser-why -- Also: Powershell `Invoke-WebRequest` — mario, May 18 '18 at 03:43
@XerShade Powershell solution worked, I'm getting two PHP 'notice'. — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 03:48
Try adding this before the location call. `header("HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect");` — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 03:50
@XerShade Both are 'undefined index' for `HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE` and `HTTP_USER_AGENT`. I'm assuming I'm getting these 'notice' because the request was sent from Powershell? As I'm getting no notice when requesting from browser. I just disabled PHP notice messages from php.ini, but still not working. — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 03:54
Another little thing but try removing the space between the : and the h on the location line. — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 03:58
Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackoverflow.com/rooms/171277/discussion-between-xershade-and-protectedvoid). — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 04:00
@mario How is this a duplicate of what you said it is, he has said multiple times that there is no error, so how can you tag it as a duplicate of that error. — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 04:12
@mario none of the answers in the other question work for me — ProtectedVoid, May 18 '18 at 04:16
@XerShade I'll leave this as duplicate until access/error.log and the required HTTP raw debug output have been edited in. In it's current form the question is unanswerable. (Look at the answers this got so far. Elaborate debugging chat notwithstanding). Summon me when something worthwhile comes up. — mario, May 18 '18 at 04:16
@mario I have a semi-solution that works, could you please unlock the question. — XerShade, May 18 '18 at 05:36
@XerShade No probs. However, I would politely request someone edit the attempts and header debugging from the chat in here. Else an answer/workaround would be slightly misleading to future visitors. (Or: your answer might better fit as post on the second duplicate otherwise. Because that one contains all the necessary details to be useful/reproducible.) — mario, May 18 '18 at 13:32
Note: this is pretty much still a duplicate of [With nginx/php-fpm, location header sometimes ignored by browser. Why?](//stackoverflow.com/q/4150717) — mario, May 18 '18 at 13:47

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 18 '18 at 20:30

Right, this is not so much as a fix to the problem but a work around to get redirects working client side while you're on your development server. I wrote up a middle ware function to generate the redirect headers for you, simply add it to your code then call Redirect("URL");.

<?php

function Redirect($location, $delay=0) {
    // Check to see if the header are already sent.
    if(!headers_sent()) {
        // Check to see if we want Refresh because Location isn't working.
        if(defined('REDIRECT_ALTERNATIVE')) {
            // We want Refresh, let's go!
            header("Refresh: $delay; URL=\"$location\"");  
            exit;
        }

        // We want to do this server side, do it!
        header("Location: $location");
        exit;
    }
}

Now that you have this function all that you need to do is in a file, preferably a constants or config file, use the code define('REDIRECT_ALTERNATIVE', true); then that will enable client side redirecting, when you are done simply comment or remove that definition and it will switch back to server side.

Again this is not a solution as much as it is a work around, but after hours of testing with the OP this is what we managed to come up with.

Edit: For anyone who is wondering what the actual problem is, the OP's development server, for whatever reason, is always setting the http code to 200, even if we changed it manually, since I had no way to access his pc and debug his setup I came up with a workaround that avoids the need for his server to manage the redirects.

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered May 18 '18 at 03:33

-1

Try this.

     header("Refresh: $seconds; URL=\"$location\"");

answered May 18 '18 at 03:33

Nauman Moazzam

158
5
17

I tested his original code, it works fine on my server so the issue is his server config. – XerShade May 18 '18 at 03:34
1

So, what is the issue? – Nauman Moazzam May 18 '18 at 03:40
This header worked, it redirected to target location. But why "Location" header is not working? – ProtectedVoid May 18 '18 at 04:04
1

@ProtectedVoid i do not know that, but if this works, you can check this answer as useful. Thanks. – Nauman Moazzam May 18 '18 at 04:29
Refresh works because it is client side, Location is server side where the issue is. – XerShade May 18 '18 at 20:33

PHP Header location not working / no HTTP Status: change

2 Answers2