In its current form, the create_project method in the Gerrit API will return that a project doesn't exist if ANY valid http is received from the server, and will exit with the same code regardless of whether a project exists (which, again, it isn't actually checking for correctly) or if the server returns a 403 or 404.

The change that's needed is to correct the query string so that it will get correct JSON results. If these aren't received, we will exit with the status code (generally, 200, 403, or 404). If our result is valid JSON, we can then check if the project exists or not, and return 1 only if it does.