nginx silently rejects the new HTTP QUERY method

RFC 10008 went to Proposed Standard in June. It adds QUERY, a new HTTP method. Safe and idempotent like GET, but it carries a body like POST. On paper, that's it. A new verb. I nearly didn't bother writing this up because of that. Then I read further into the RFC and found a line saying older proxies, frameworks and load balancer configs might not recognise the method yet. It doesn't say which ones. It doesn't say what "not recognise" even means in practice. Does it 404? 405? Does it just eat the body and treat it as GET? Nobody tells you, so I rented a box and found out myself. Most codebases I've touched have a POST /search somewhere, and it's always for the same reason: GET can't carry a real filter object, and nobody fancies fighting a URL length limit over it. QUERY fixes that, in theory. Whether it works in practice depends on every layer between the client and your view agreeing to let the method through. That's not something the RFC can tell you. Only running it can. So that's what I did. One backend, three reverse proxies in front of it, one separate Django app on the side, and a droplet I could throw away the second I had numbers. What I built A FastAPI backend on port 8001. nginx, Caddy and Traefik each fronting it on their own port. A separate Django project too, with two class-based views, because Django isn't built on Starlette and dispatches methods completely differently. All of it on one DigitalOcean Droplet in Frankfurt, fra1, s-2vcpu-4gb, Ubuntu 24.04. I killed the droplet the moment testing was done. Versions, in case you're checking this later: curl 8.5.0. FastAPI 0.141.1 on Starlette 1.6.0. Django 6.1.1. nginx 1.24.0. Caddy 2.11.4. Traefik 3.7.10. curl already does this properly First question, before anything else: can the tooling even send a QUERY request with a body? I pointed curl at a bare netcat listener to see the raw bytes. curl -s -m 2 -X QUERY -H "Content-Type: application/json" \ -d '{"q":"test"}' http://127.0.0.1:8000/search QUERY /