ctx.throw doesn’t set ctx.status

I stumbled upon this issue when trying to throw an Unauthorized error like:

   ...,
  async (ctx, next) => {
    if (!ctx.state.user) {
      ctx.throw(401, 'Unauthorized');
    }
    ctx.state.payload.user = ctx.state.user;
    return await next();
  }
  ...

The response’ status code always was 404. According to Koa docs the use of ctx.throw above is equivalent to:

   ...,
  async (ctx, next) => {
    if (!ctx.state.user) {
      ctx.status = 401;
      throw new Error('Unauthorized');
    }
    ctx.state.payload.user = ctx.state.user;
    return await next();
  }
  ...

But it isn’t. Setting status first and then throwing an error results in a correct 401 Unauthorized response as expected while using ctx.throw doesn’t.

Looking at the relevant code there is just an http-error created and thrown but nothing indicates that ctx.status is being set.

  throw() {
    throw createError.apply(null, arguments);
  },

So it seems the response comes with status overridden by Koa’s default 404, no matter what status code you pass to ctx.throw.

[chanlito]

try return ctx.throw(401, ‘Unauthorized’) ??

[oliverwehn]

Tried already. createError – imported from the third-party http-errors module – is passed the arguments array of context’s .throw method and itself doesn’t care in which order the arguments are passed, as it extracts the values depending on their type.

Found the cause of my problem already. As soon as you catch the error in one of the middleware functions (as I do up the stream), onerror is called with null and doesn’t go ahead with default error handling. So I have to assign the error’s status code to ctx.status myself. My bad! Thanks anyways. Closing.