Sends a response header to the request. The status code is a 3-digit HTTP status code, like 404. The last argument, headers, are the response headers.

Returns a reference to the Http2ServerResponse, so that calls can be chained.

For compatibility with HTTP/1, a human-readable statusMessage may be passed as the second argument. However, because the statusMessage has no meaning within HTTP/2, the argument will have no effect and a process warning will be emitted.

const body = 'hello world';
response.writeHead(200, {
  'Content-Length': Buffer.byteLength(body),
  'Content-Type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8',
});

Content-Length is given in bytes not characters. TheBuffer.byteLength() API may be used to determine the number of bytes in a given encoding. On outbound messages, Node.js does not check if Content-Length and the length of the body being transmitted are equal or not. However, when receiving messages, Node.js will automatically reject messages when theContent-Length does not match the actual payload size.

This method may be called at most one time on a message before response.end() is called.

If response.write() or response.end() are called before calling this, the implicit/mutable headers will be calculated and call this function.

When headers have been set with response.setHeader(), they will be merged with any headers passed to response.writeHead(), with the headers passed to response.writeHead() given precedence.

// Returns content-type = text/plain
const server = http2.createServer((req, res) => {
  res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8');
  res.setHeader('X-Foo', 'bar');
  res.writeHead(200, { 'Content-Type': 'text/plain; charset=utf-8' });
  res.end('ok');
});

Attempting to set a header field name or value that contains invalid characters will result in a TypeError being thrown.