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)

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

proxy_http_version 1.1; 

And it works...

Answer 4

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