response.writeHead()

response.writeHead(statusCode[, statusMessage][, headers])

Sends a response header to the request. The status code is a 3-digit HTTP status code, like 404. The last argument, headers, are the response headers. Optionally one can give a human-readable statusMessage as the second argument.

Example:

var body = 'hello world';
response.writeHead(200, {
  'Content-Length': body.length,
  'Content-Type': 'text/plain' });

This method must only be called once on a message and it must be called before response.end() is called.

If you call response.write() or response.end() before calling this, the implicit/mutable headers will be calculated and call this function for you.

When headers have been set with response.setHeader(), they will be merged with any headers passed to response.writeHead(), with the headers passed to response.writeHead() given precedence.

// returns content-type = text/plain
const server = http.createServer((req,res) => {
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html');
  res.setHeader('X-Foo', 'bar');
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('ok');
});

Note that Content-Length is given in bytes not characters. The above example works because the string 'hello world' contains only single byte characters. If the body contains higher coded characters then Buffer.byteLength() should be used to determine the number of bytes in a given encoding. And Node.js does not check whether Content-Length and the length of the body which has been transmitted are equal or not.

Attempting to set a header field name or value that contains invalid characters will result in a TypeError being thrown.