202 Accepted

The HTTP 202 Accepted successful response status code indicates that a request has been accepted for processing, but processing has not been completed or may not have started. The actual processing of the request is not guaranteed; a task or action may fail or be disallowed when a server tries to process it.

A 202 response is non-committal, meaning there is no way to later send an asynchronous HTTP response to indicate the outcome of the processing. This response code is typically used when the request is handled by another process or server, or when requests are processed in batches.

Status

http
202 Accepted

Examples

Begin automated task

In the following example, we want to kick off an automation process to email dog owners about a pickup task:

http
POST /tasks HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "task": "emailDogOwners",
  "template": "pickup"
}

The response indicates that the request to start a task was accepted for processing. A URL is sent in the response body so the client can track changes to the status of the task:

http
HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.1 (Unix)
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "message": "Request accepted. Starting to process task.",
  "taskId": "123",
  "monitorUrl": "http://example.com/tasks/123/status"
}

Specifications

Specification
HTTP Semantics
# status.202

See also