HTTP status codes in APIs good practice? - php

Question

right now I'm building a project with the laravel framework. I'm not a professional or whatever, in the past I built all my applications from scratch without the use of such frameworks.
Right now I'm implenting the Twitch API for certain parts of my website. While doing that I encoutered situations where the Twitch API returns an http error code (40x) even though it provides a "valid" response. Right now I'm using a pretty popular Twitch API package from packagist.org. As soon as I receive an 40x error code an exception will be thrown which would would break my application.
Reason for that is, that the response request looks like this:
$response = $this->client->send($request);
As a workaround I changed this to:
$response = $this->client->send($request, ['http_errors' => false]);
Obviously I could also make use of GuzzleHttp\Exception to handle these errors aswell. But from what I get, all of this would have to happen inside the package I downloaded via composer which means that as soon as the author releases an update and I run a composer update my changes would be overwritten and my app might be broken until I fix it again.
I guess not everyone is familiar with the Twitch API. An easy example for my question is an API call where you can check wether a specific user is following a a specific channel. When the user does NOT, the response looks like that:
{
"error": "Not Found",
"message": "12345 is not following 67890",
"status": 404 }
So this is a perfectly fine and valid response that would be easy to handle but instead of an 200 http status response the api responds with a 404 http status code which will throw an exception.
So my question is, is it really good practice in APIs to return a 40x status code even though you send and receive perfectly fine requests? It's not like there's an error like missing parameters, ids or whatever. It's just some kind of "bool" query where return can be true or false and where false will always return a 40x http status code but still contains a valid response.
Thank you

Answer 1

Package that is throwing an exception is the best kind, because you can simply write "global" handler for those exceptions and simply "display" error that is sent along, nevertheless you should not.
You should write an API adaptor for Twitch API package and handle errors / exceptions inside those methods instead of using Twitch package right in controller or model. Further more you should delegate making request to dedicated server (such as Twitch) for queued job.
To answer your question:
Are HTTP status codes in APIs good practice?
Yes, where else would you want to use status codes? API is the perfect place.
Status codes are easy to compare, easy to understand. Messages sent along are just meta information for human to "understand" what is going on.
Part below is way off the scope of the question:
You should never change package code itself (except when testing), instead clone/fork package, make changes you need and use composer to load your version instead.
composer.json
"repositories": [
{
"type": "vcs",
"url": "https://github.com/username/repository"
}
],
"require": {
.
.
.
"original-repo-package": "dev-branch-form-your-repo as 1.0.0"
}