Robot Has No Heart

Given the following Servant API (boilerplate redacted for brevity):

1 type MyAPI = "some-api" :> Get '[JSON] NoContent
2 
3 someApi = return NoContent

How do you add a Last-Modified header? As a first attempt, we can use the Header type with addHeader and a UTCTime:

 1 import Data.Time.Clock (UTCTime, getCurrentTime)
 2 
 3 type LastModifiedHeader = Header "Last-Modified" UTCTime
 4 type MyAPI = "some-api" :> Get '[JSON] (Headers '[LastModifiedHeader] NoContent)
 5 
 6 someApi = do
 7   now <- getCurrentTime
 8   addHeader now
 9   return NoContent

Unfortunately, this returns the time in the wrong format!

> curl -I localhost/some-api | grep Last-Modified
Last-Modified: 2018-09-30T19:56:39Z

It should be RFC 1123. We can fix this with a newtype that wraps the formatting functions available in Data.Time.Format:

 1 {-# LANGUAGE GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving #-}
 2 
 3 import Data.ByteString (pack)
 4 import Data.Time.Clock (UTCTime, getCurrentTime)
 5 import Data.Time.Format (formatTime, defaultTimeLocale, rfc1123DateFormat)
 6 
 7 newtype RFC1123Time = RFC1123Time UTCTime
 8   deriving (Show, FormatTime)
 9 
10 instance ToHttpApiData RFC1123Time where
11   toUrlPiece = error "Not intended to be used in URLs"
12   toHeader =
13     let rfc1123DateFormat = "%a, %_d %b %Y %H:%M:%S GMT" in
14     pack . formatTime defaultTimeLocale rfc1123DateFormat
15 
16 type LastModifiedHeader = Header "Last-Modified" RFC1123Time
17 type MyAPI = "some-api" :> Get '[JSON] (Headers '[LastModifiedHeader] NoContent)
18 
19 someApi = do
20   now <- getCurrentTime
21   addHeader $ RFC1123Time now
22   return NoContent

> curl -I localhost/some-api | grep Last-Modified
Last-Modified: Sun, 30 Sep 2018 20:44:16 GMT

If anyone knows a simpler way, please let me know!

Irreverant technical asides

Many implementations reference RFC822 for Last-Modified format. What gives? RFC822 was updated by RFC1123, which only adds a few clauses to tighten up the definition. Most importantly, it updates the year format from 2 digits to 4! Note that Date.Time.Format.rfc882DateFormat is technically incorrect here, specifying a four digit year. Data.Time.Format.RFC822 gets it right.

rfc822DateFormat is also technically incorrect in another way: it uses the %Z format specifier for timezone, which produces UTC on a UTCTime. This is not an allowed value! However, RFC 2616 says “for the purposes of HTTP, GMT is exactly equal to UTC” so GMT can safely be hardcoded here since we know we always have a UTC time.