412 Precondition Failed

Estimated reading: 2 minutes 1306 views

This status error indicates that access has been denied to the target resource. Conditional configurations need to be set for requesting access to the target.

In some cases this may be due to attempting to upload or modifying the target resource. If so, then verify the necessary configurations for successfully completing the request.

If this error is unexpected, the user should verify the browser configuration and the accuracy of the server request. If the issue persists unexpectedly then contacting server support is recommended.

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) 412 Precondition Failed client error response code indicates that access to the target resource has been denied. This happens with conditional requests on methods other than GET or HEAD when the condition defined by the If-Unmodified-Since or If-None-Match headers is not fulfilled. In that case, the request, usually an upload or a modification of a resource, cannot be made and this error response is sent back.

Status

412 Precondition Failed

Examples

ETag: "33a64df551425fcc55e4d42a148795d9f25f89d4"
ETag: W/"0815"

Avoiding mid-air collisions

With the help of the ETag and the If-Match headers, you can detect mid-air edit collisions.

For example, when editing MDN, the current wiki content is hashed and put into an Etag in the response:

ETag: "33a64df551425fcc55e4d42a148795d9f25f89d4"

When saving changes to a wiki page (posting data), the POST request will contain the If-Match header containing the ETag values to check freshness against.

If-Match: "33a64df551425fcc55e4d42a148795d9f25f89d4"

If the hashes don’t match, it means that the document has been edited in-between and a 412 Precondition Failed error is thrown.

Specifications

Specification
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP/1.1): Conditional Requests
# status.412