Chunked Transfer

[Jonathan Matthews]

On 29 October 2012 10:08, Maxim Dounin <mdounin at mdounin.ru> wrote:
> Hello!
>
> On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 04:58:46PM -0400, AJ Weber wrote:
>
>> Asking, because the documentation looks like it's a little outdated
>> on this...
>>
>> Is Chunked Transfer still not enabled OOTB?  This would seem like
>> almost a mandatory feature of HTTP 1.1 to implement, and the only
>> reference I could find is to separate source code/module/patch that
>> I would have to download and recompile all of nginx for?
>>
>> Has it been implemented or added to the default, pre-compiled
>> packages and I just can't see it in the nginx -V output?
>>
>> I need the ability to upload large content, and this would appear to
>> be the proper way to do that.
>
> I'm working on it, and it's expected to be available later this
> month.
>
> BTW, if you know examples of real-world use of chunked transfer
> encoding by clients - please let me know.  AFAIK no browsers use
> it, and most widespread example I'm aware of is the webdav client
> in Mac OS X.

I wanted to use it in this report-generating pipeline:

bash$ mysql -e 'generate lots of data' | perl 'do some munging' |
csvtool 'make a proper CSV' | gzip | curl --upload-file -
http://my.webdav.endpoint.for.customers/foo/bar.gz

The fact that the chunkin module wouldn't work properly with webdav
due to curl choosing chunking when PUTting stdin, meant I had to break
this into multiple parts and ensure that curl could upload a complete
file from disk. I mentioned the issue here:
http://mailman.nginx.org/pipermail/nginx/2012-April/033141.html

This increased the complexity of what I was doing, as I now had local
state on disk that had to be managed/cleaned-up/etc.

Just my 2 cents,
Jonathan
-- 
Jonathan Matthews // Oxford, London, UK
http://www.jpluscplusm.com/contact.html