I tested both with PHP 5.3 and 5.6 and file_get_contents() works with a 204 response.

No error:

php -r "var_dump(file_get_contents('http://quiet-fog-825.herokuapp.com/204'));"

Error (404 status) which is normal:

php -r "var_dump(file_get_contents('http://quiet-fog-825.herokuapp.com/404'));"

Reading this stackoverflow question, it might be a problem of a specific PHP version…

The commit mentioned in the stackoverflow question is this one: php/php-src@15da836

It turns out it's included in PHP 5.3.0 and above.

Maybe the forum user that reported this is using PHP 5.2 on the server where he put the proxy script?

Maybe the forum user that reported this is using PHP 5.2 on the server where he put the proxy script?

That's really possible! (server hosting the proxy does not have to be 5.3 + )

I guess we could add some kind of test for the proxy piwik.php to prevent it breaking in the future

Do we really want to maintain this script for PHP 5.2? We could accept PRs if people want to fix it, but not actively maintain it ourselves for obsolete PHP versions?

if it's easily fixable then let's fix it, if not then we can skip... this script is not supposed to require 5.3 and ideally would work with old PHP as its goal is to proxy requests and this should not fail (or we get data loss)

@mnapoli I guess we could make it work on PHP 5.2 by adding &send_image=1 to the URL request so it does return 200 instead of 204 (previous behavior) ?

@mattab good idea, seems like an easy fix, I'll give it a try

Good point by the bug reporter: the HTTP status should be forwarded by the proxy (even if we fix this bug)

@mattab I implemented your suggestion: matomo-org/tracker-proxy@42ff2de

This issue should be fixed in the new repository: piwik/tracker-proxy