Ignore responses from http.Head()

[Jille]

HTTP HEAD calls by definition don't have a response body.

The documentation on https://pkg.go.dev/net/http for each of Client.Do, Client.Get, Client.Post and Client.PostForm states that the caller must close the response body. However, this is not mentioned for Head calls.

Similar to http.Head() we should also ignore http.Client.Head().

[ccoVeille]

It's open for discussion I would say.

Head returns an empty body, yes. But I would say they return an empty body when things works.

Also an empty body is a body. It's not an asynchronous call. There will be a body that will be empty.

Imagine a HEAD returning a 400 validation error, 403 forbidden, or 401 unauthorized, 404 not found, or a 500 internal error.

So while the typical/expected case for HEAD is an empty body, I wouldn’t assume there’s never content, especially on error responses. This may be something worth considering before universally ignoring response bodies for HEAD requests.

I don't think the HTTP spec forbid sending bodies with error (non-2xx) responses to HEAD

Maybe someone want to read it. Or the code is a middleware that handles everything, and wouldn't handle HEAD.

The Go client won't return one on HEAD by default, that's right. But it would be difficult to know if the transport configured on the http.Client component/middleware doesn't.

This is my analysis. I might be wrong.

Maybe your issue is relevant, but the existing error message could be kept, but slightly adapted for HEAD