X-Accel-Redirect and Content-Length Header

[Geoffrey Grosenbach]

First, thanks to all those who work on Nginx. It's a fantastic web
server and has made my life easier in many ways.

Technical details: Using Nginx 0.5.19 with Mongrel and Ruby on Rails

My problem is that content sent with X-Accel-Redirect doesn't send a
Content-Length header. I'm sending 100-200 MB files and it would be
nice if the client can have a progress bar to tell them how much there
is left to download. Without the Content-length header, they just see
"10 MB of ? remaining" in the web browser.

I tried sending a Content-length header from my Rails app with the
X-Accel-Redirect header, but it seems to be stripped out of the
headers when sent to the client. I also tried adding the header
manually in the nginx.config, but it's always sends 0.

  add_header Content-Length $content_length;

My last resort was to hard-code a reasonable value for the Content-Length

  add_header Content-Length 150000000;

This works, but isn't optimal.

Can anyone recommend a good way to do this?

Thanks,

Geoffrey Grosenbach
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