Empty host header on http 1.1 results in invalid host header logging in error.log

[Bart Warmerdam]

Hello,

Why does nginx logs an info log a message like ...client sent invalid 
host header while reading client request headers... request: "GET 
/keepalive.html HTTP/1.1", host: ""
if the host header is empty. According to the http 1.1 specification it 
is legal to send an empty host header so it should not log this message 
since the header is not invalid. So the requests contains the host 
header but without a value. The call also results in a 400 instead of a 
2xx or 3xx response.

Regards,

B.


curl -v -H "Host: " http://someserver/keepalive.html
*   Trying xx.xx.xx.xx...
* Connected to someserver (xx.xx.xx.xx) port 80 (#0)
> GET /keepalive.html HTTP/1.1
> Host:
> User-Agent: curl/7.43.0
> Accept: */*
> 
< HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request
< Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2015 04:50:51 GMT
< Content-Type: text/html
< Content-Length: 1214
< Connection: close
< ETag: "55ae9a88-4be"
<