I was building an API, and consulting some http status codes when i saw the 418 status code on the MDN documentation.
418 I'm a teapot
The server refuses the attempt to brew coffee with a teapot.
And this is what the MDN says about it:
The HTTP 418 I'm a teapot client error response code indicates that the server refuses to brew coffee because it is a teapot. This error is a reference to Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol which was an April Fools' joke in 1998.
You can check the documentation here:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status
And here is the RFC:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2324#section-2.3.2
Then i asked myself: WTF?
Most of you devs may already known this staus code and even its history, but many dont. So, there it goes:
"So, what’s the "418 I'm a teapot" all about? Well, the group of people who make these codes and set the standards is the IETF or "Internet Engineering Task Force". To propose new standards, the members release RFC’s or "Requests for Comments" to the community. Every year since 1989, they release a few humorous RFC’s for April’s Fool Day and on April 1st, 1998, RFC 2324 introduced the "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol" or (HTCPCP/1.0). This was a brand new protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. Now, the RFC is pretty funny with lines like "Coffee pots heat water using electronic mechanisms, so there is no fire. (...) Now, you may be asking, if this is a COFFEE protocol, why the "teapot" code? This is answered in Section 2.3.2. in that "Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the HTTP error code 418 I'm a teapot and the resulting entity body MAY be short and stout". And just like that the "418 I’m a teapot" code was born! Since then, it's been used in all sorts of wacky ways. Google even referred to "418" as a different error in their 2013 April Fool's Joke "Google Nose" saying that "418: Scent transfer protocol error" indicates system congestion; please try again later".
from: https://sitesdoneright.com/blog/2013/03/what-is-418-im-a-teapot-status-code-error
So, its just a joke.
Personally, i found it very cool ;P
Top comments (11)
This API for HTTP error codes always cracks me up.
Check out their HTTP 418 error code. 😸
OMG, the http.cat is awesome hahahaha. I loved the 100, 204, 401, also 418 ;P
Not related to your post, but since you liked the http.cat API,Todd Motto has a great repository for public APIs
A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.
Public APIs
A collective list of free APIs for use in software and web development.
Sponsor:
A public API for this project can be found here - thanks to DigitalOcean for helping us provide this service!
For information on contributing to this project, please see the contributing guide.
Please note a passing build status indicates all listed APIs are available since the last update. A failing build status indicates that 1 or more services may be unavailable at the moment.
Index
really nice. thank you!
Here's one famous case where it wasn't a joke:
I'm opening this issue because:
all of the above.
What's going wrong?
This afternoon all servers in our AWS EU-Frankfurt environment started throwing the error regardless of what package we are trying to install
npm ERR! code E418 npm ERR! 418 I'm a teapot: commander@~2.3.0It then locks up and does not exit the process.
How can the CLI team reproduce the problem?
npm installThere is nothing being written to the npm-debug.log as the process does not do anything
supporting information:
npm -vprints: 5.6.0node -vprints: 8.9.0npm config get registryprints: registry.npmjs.org/Windows, OS X/macOS, or Linux?: Amazon Linux AMI release 2017.09
Network issues:
Container: No container.
The moral of the story is to think carefully about referencing Easter eggs like this in your projects, even in supposedly unreachable code!
damn... what a mess S: you are totally right about think carefully. you read the comments on this issue and start to get exponentially tense.
One of the speakers at CascadiaJS, Domink Kundel, mentioned this the other day in reference to hardware hacking where, in one example, he used JavaScript to control a coffee maker. He also interfaced with a cheap Star Wars Porg toy to scream at him whenever a Webpack build fails. Good times.
Thats so cool! No, really, thats really cool. I would really like to have a coffee maker controlled by JS on my office (and the cheap start wars porg too).
Ja, so cool!
Don't you read the RFC's? :) I do that regularly :)
i should, i know S: