<p>We're using HAProxy as a load balancer at the moment, and it regularly makes requests to the downstream boxes to make sure they're alive using an OPTIONS request:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>OPTIONS /index.html HTTP/1.0</p>
</blockquote>

<p>I'm working with getting nginx set up as a reverse proxy with caching (using ncache).  For some reason, nginx is returning a 405 when an OPTIONS request comes in:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>192.168.1.10 - - [22/Oct/2008:16:36:21 -0700] "OPTIONS /index.html HTTP/1.0" 405 325 "-" "-" 192.168.1.10</p>
</blockquote>

<p>When hitting the downstream webserver directly, I get a proper 200 response.  My question is: how to you make nginx pass that response along to HAProxy, or, how can I set the response in the nginx.conf?</p>

In the httpchk option, you can specify the HTTP method like this:
```
```
httpchk GET http://example.com/check.php
```
```
You can also use POST, or a plain URI like /. I have it check PHP, since PHP runs external to Nginx.