I thought about opening an issue for this question in the Req repo, but I think it’s more an issue with my HTTP knowledge. I’m hoping someone here can point me in the right direction.

I have an application that builds a database from an external data source. The data is available in .zip files and downloaded by performing get requests to known URLs. I am performing the requests like this

Req.get!(url, raw: true, output: file_path)

Occasionally I want to rebuild the database in development. Lately I’ve been getting exceptions during some attempts to rebuild when the files cannot be unzipped, due to invalid file contents {:error, :einval}. I traced the error to the request response, which is returning a status 304 "not modified" and a body "". The empty body contents are being written to the output file path, causing the unzip error downstream.

%Req.Response{
  body: "",
  headers: [
    {"content-type", "application/zip"},
    {"last-modified", "Wed, 22 Sep 2021 19:48:44 GMT"},
    {"cache-control", "private, max-age=169126"},
    {"date", "Sun, 03 Jul 2022 15:21:43 GMT"},
    {"connection", "keep-alive"}
  ],
  private: %{},
  status: 304
}

Is there any way to get around the 304, or to force my way to a 200 with the desired response body? Or is there just no workaround as long as I’m requesting the same contents from the same IP within the server’s cool-down period?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.