My name is
Jurgens du Toit.
Systems Developer.
Problem Solver.
About Me
Technology and Solving Problems are my passion. I'm a South African that loves my wife, life, and coding.
Twitter API Request Entity too large / HTTP 413 error
By Jurgens du Toit
I’ve setup zacoders.net that it will automatically tweet new RFC’s. A while back this functionality stopped working. Today I investigated a bit further, and here’s what I found.
When posting an update, the Twitter API responded with a 413 HTTP error code, and the following text:
Request Entity Too Large
The requested resource
/1/statuses/update.json
does not allow request data with POST requests,
or the amount of data provided in the request
exceeds the capacity limit.
I realized that the backend’s OAuth utility sent through POST requests with the parameters included in the URI, just like a GET request:
POST HTTP/1.1 http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/update.json?parameters=here
What baffled me is that I only got this error when running it on my live server, not on my testing local server. I suspect it might be a difference in the Curl libraries, but I’m not sure.
To fix it, I just updated the code to only add the parameters to the URI when it was a GET, and to POST the data when it was a POST, and voila, it’s working again.