caching 404 status code responses breaks default RestClient behavior

[carlost]

404s are cacheable and some systems respond with cache friendly response headers. A public site that responds with cache 404s is https://www.theonion.com/.

RestClient raises an exception when a request results in a 404 response. Unfortunately, cached 404 responses break this behavior.

• uncached requests that result in 404s will raise a RestClient exceptions: RestClient::NotFound: 404 Not Found
• cached requests that result in 404s return an instance ofRestClient::Response

Using

• ruby 2.5.1
• rack-cache (1.7.1)
• rest-client (2.0.2)
• rest-client-components (1.5.0)

to recreate:

require 'restclient'
require 'restclient/exceptions'
require 'restclient/components'
require 'rack/cache'

RestClient.enable Rack::Cache

begin
  # this should throw a RestClient exception
  RestClient.get('https://www.theonion.com/tag/askdfkasdj')
  raise 'I guess we did not get an exception from the 404'
rescue RestClient::ResourceNotFound => e
  puts 'the first request raised a 404 exception'
end

response = RestClient.get('https://www.theonion.com/tag/askdfkasdj')

puts 'the second request did not raise a 404 exception'
puts "second response was of type: #{response.class}"
puts "second response code: #{response.code}"