Enabling nginx Chunked Transfer Encoding

Question

It looks like nginx 0.8.35 may support chunked transfer encoding:

Changes with nginx 0.8.35 01 Apr 2010
*) Change: now the charset filter runs before the SSI filter.

*) Feature: the "chunked_transfer_encoding" directive.

This is great, because I'm trying to get push git changes through an nginx reverse proxy to a git-http-backend process. Git HTTP takes advantage of chunked transfer encoding for client-side efficiency reasons.

However, I can't get it to work. I'm using nginx 0.8.44 on Debian Lenny with the following configure invocation:

./configure \
--sbin-path=/usr/sbin \
--conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf \
--error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log \
--http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log \
--user=www-data \
--group=www-data \
--pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid \
--lock-path=/var/lock/nginx.lock \
--with-http_ssl_module \
--with-http_gzip_static_module \
--with-http_realip_module

And the following conf file:

server {
    server_name example.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass  http://192.168.0.10;
        include     /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
        chunked_transfer_encoding on;
    }
}

And my proxy.conf looks like this:

proxy_redirect          off;
proxy_set_header        Host $host;
proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
client_max_body_size    100M;
client_body_buffer_size 128k;
proxy_connect_timeout   90;
proxy_send_timeout      90;
proxy_read_timeout      90;
proxy_buffer_size       4k;
proxy_buffers           4 32k;
proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k;
proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;

(Originally I posted this question to Stack Overflow but was advised it's more appropriate to Server Fault)

You cannot have buffers as well as chunked encoding. Buffers wait to send data, chunked should send it immediately. — Martin Fjordvald, Jul 11 '10 at 16:59
Apparently Nginx supports Chunked since version 1.3.9 (27/11/2012). However, I still get "411 Length Required" error messages when a smartphone sends chunked POST requests to my Nginx server. Any advice? — Meir, May 12 '13 at 09:05
Where you able to adjust the chunk size somehow or know which parameter does this? — blkpingu, Mar 07 '21 at 08:29

score 30 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '10 at 02:15

This is an old question, I know, but it came up in a search for the problem (which I've spent the afternoon trying to solve). Martin F's comment gave me enough of a clue to get it working!

The trick is to set proxy_buffering off; in your location block. Assuming that your upstream server is sending back chunked responses, this will cause nginx to send the individual chunks back to the client - even gzipping them on the fly if you have gzip output compression turned on.

Note that turning off buffering may have other disadvantages, so don't go blindly turning off buffering without understanding why.

It finally solved my problem with proxying HTTP 1.1 web admin which I tackled for days. Damn. Thank you. — confused-demon, May 11 '20 at 08:09

Roger Binns · Answer 2 · 2011-12-18T06:11:08.560

9

I suggest editing your question to clarify. There is a big difference between chunked requests and chunked responses. John Dalton's answer addresses the latter. Git does both.

Nginx does not currently support chunked POST requests and this posting shows up high in search results on the topic. Chunked POST requests are used when you do not know the amount of data being uploaded in advance and is frequently used by mobile phones.

The only working solution I found is this:

http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpChunkinModule

Unfortunately it requires recompiling nginx as nginx doesn't support loadable modules.

edited Dec 18 '11 at 06:11

answered Jan 30 '11 at 08:17

Roger Binns

191
1
3

I agree: I'm finding that HttpChunkinModule is the only theoretical workaround... but it's not open to me in my situation. Does anyone know if anything else can be done? (Any changes since 30 Jan 2011?) – mdahlman Dec 16 '11 at 00:26
1

No changes that I know. I just did an nginx recompilation the other day in order to enable this. – Roger Binns Dec 18 '11 at 06:12

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 28 '16 at 16:42

4

On my case... i try a lot of things and finally only need add to configuration

proxy_http_version 1.1;

And it works...

edited Oct 28 '16 at 16:42

Ladadadada

25,847
7
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90

answered Oct 28 '16 at 09:06

Cesar Gallego

41
1

I had to add `proxy_set_header Connection "";`... original answer from -> https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,247883,247883#msg-247883 – Christian Ulbrich Apr 18 '17 at 22:24
This worked for me as well. But I really don't understand why. – Jeff Oct 23 '19 at 13:56
1

Update to my last comment.... this worked because my upstream server was using Chunked Transfer Encoding, which was introduced in HTTP 1.1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding). The default http protocol version for nginx proxying is 1.0. – Jeff Oct 23 '19 at 15:13

score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 15 '14 at 12:29

1

Other answers used to be valid, but this is an old question.

It seems like Chunked Transfers are supported per nginx 1.3.9[1], which was released mid 2013 I think.

[1] http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpChunkinModule

answered Jan 15 '14 at 12:29

sandstrom

498
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Enabling nginx Chunked Transfer Encoding

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