Since intermediaries are a common part of HTTP infrastructure some responses to gRPC requests may be received that do not include the grpc-status header. In some cases mapping error codes from an intermediary allows the gRPC client to behave more appropriately to the error situation without overloading the semantics of either error code.
This table is to be used only for clients that received a response that did not include grpc-status. If grpc-status was provided, it must be used. Servers must not use this table to determine an HTTP status code to use; the mappings are neither symmetric nor 1-to-1.
| HTTP Status Code | gRPC Status Code |
|---|---|
| 400 Bad Request | INTERNAL |
| 401 Unauthorized | UNAUTHENTICATED |
| 403 Forbidden | PERMISSION_DENIED |
| 404 Not Found | UNIMPLEMENTED |
| 429 Too Many Requests | UNAVAILABLE |
| 502 Bad Gateway | UNAVAILABLE |
| 503 Service Unavailable | UNAVAILABLE |
| 504 Gateway Timeout | UNAVAILABLE |
| All other codes | UNKNOWN |
Technically, 1xx should have the entire header skipped and a subsequent header be read. See RFC 7540 §8.1.
200 is UNKNOWN because there should be a grpc-status in case of truly OK response.