Working with HTTP Headers in Rails
rails http headers tips
Note (Updated 2025): This tip is still useful.
request.headersin Rails continues to include both external HTTP headers and internal Rack/Rails environment keys. For production apps, you can also consider middleware (e.g., Rack::Request) or gems like rack-cors if your use case involves CORS or security filtering.
Accessing request headers in Rails is as simple as:
request.headers["HEADER_NAME"]But request.headers actually contains both external HTTP headers and Rails/Rack environment variables. That’s inconvenient if you only want to process client-sent headers.
Brute-Force Filtering
One way is to match headers by a prefix:
request.env.select { |k, v|
k.match("^HTTP.*|^CONTENT.*|^REMOTE.*|^REQUEST.*|^AUTHORIZATION.*|^SCRIPT.*|^SERVER.*").
}This works but can feel messy. It relies on convention and regex matching, which might break in unusual edge cases.
Safer Approach: Reject Keys with Dots
Rails environment variables are namespaced (e.g., action_dispatch.show_exceptions, rack.input). By convention, HTTP headers do not contain dots — in fact, Nginx rejects them by default.
That means you can safely filter out internal variables by rejecting keys that contain a dot:
request.headers.env.reject { |key| key.to_s.include?('.') }This neatly gives you just the external headers.
Modern Alternatives (2025)
- Middleware filtering: pre-process/whitelist headers at the Rack layer.
- Security-conscious filtering: For CORS and auth headers, rely on middleware like rack-cors.
- Header conventions: Today’s best practice is to explicitly whitelist expected headers rather than filtering reactively. For example:
ALLOWED_HEADERS = %w[HTTP_AUTHORIZATION HTTP_X_REQUEST_ID HTTP_USER_AGENT]
headers = request.headers.env.slice(*ALLOWED_HEADERS)Wrap-up
- Rails mixes external headers and env keys in
request.headers. - Filtering out keys containing
.is a neat, practical solution. - For more robust setups, consider explicit whitelists or middleware-based filtering.