Rails - Jun 2006 - Missing Content-Length header with lighttpd

We have our rails application running using lighttpd and everything 
seems fine with Firefox, but when the client is Explorer some media 
doesn''t get transferred from the server correctly.  With Webrick, 
Content-Length is set when a request is made for an mp3 file.  Using 
Firefox with lighttpd, Transfer-Encoding is set to chunked, so the 
Content-Length field isn''t required.  With IE, however, neither 
Content-Length nor Transfer-Encoding is set.

For straight-forward downloads that isn''t a problem (?), but I want the
content to be played by a Flash mp3 player, and as it stands right now 
the player doesn''t seem to be receiving the mp3 -- and I''m
pretty sure
that''s because the response header is missing both Content-Length and 
Transfer-Encoding fields. There''s a very nice blog entry on this
problem
at: http://www.purpletech.com/blog/?itemid=43 , but adding the suggested 
after_filter to my application controller didn''t make a difference -- I
assume either Rails or Lighttpd is over-riding my header settings.

Does anybody have any clues as to how I can get the response header to 
include either Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding: chunked?  Any advice 
greatly appreciated.

Alexis

-- Response headers are as follows:

Firefox:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:23:59 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.10
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Set-Cookie: _session_id=640a71da388d5b1b9722cd8a4bb4da1b; path=/
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Cache-Control: private
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="testing.mp3"
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

IE:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 09:23:31 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.10
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Set-Cookie: _session_id=12ac3d5b185fc60936d8d5e82459394a; path=/
Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary
Cache-Control: private
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="testing.mp3"
Connection: close

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

So has nobody else had any problems with lighttpd and content-length 
headers not being set?  Given that the lighttpd/fcgi combo seems to be 
the setup of choice, that would seem bizarre to me.  The Rails wiki 
seems to recognize the problem -- from 
http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUploadFiles
>This stuff won?t work in lighttpd due to a bug in lighttpd and file uploads.
>That was many versions ago, however. It may work now.
Ignoring send_file or send_data and setting the headers/writing the body 
myself, I can seem to set just about every single header except 
Content-Length -- whatever I put in Content-Length gets completely 
ignored.  The only way I can get anything put in Content-Length is 
actually if I set it (to anything) while simultaneously (and illegally) 
setting Transfer-Encoding to chunked.  In this case, Content-Length is 
output as zero, which is useless anyway.

Is it time to start looking into Mongrel?

Alexis

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 04:26 +0200, Alexis Glass wrote:
> So has nobody else had any problems with lighttpd and content-length 
> headers not being set?  Given that the lighttpd/fcgi combo seems to be 
> the setup of choice, that would seem bizarre to me.  The Rails wiki 
> seems to recognize the problem -- from 
> http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowtoUploadFiles
> 
> >This stuff won?t work in lighttpd due to a bug in lighttpd and file
uploads.
> >That was many versions ago, however. It may work now.
> 
> Ignoring send_file or send_data and setting the headers/writing the body 
> myself, I can seem to set just about every single header except 
> Content-Length -- whatever I put in Content-Length gets completely 
> ignored.  The only way I can get anything put in Content-Length is 
> actually if I set it (to anything) while simultaneously (and illegally) 
> setting Transfer-Encoding to chunked.  In this case, Content-Length is 
> output as zero, which is useless anyway.
> 
> Is it time to start looking into Mongrel?
Try out the X-Sendfile header, it might work better if you just want
rails to hand lighty a file.  After that try using webrick and then
mongrel directly and see if you can get the content-length.  If you
don''t then you''re doing it wrong.  If you do then lighty is
doing it
wrong.


-- 
Zed A. Shaw
http://www.zedshaw.com/
http://mongrel.rubyforge.org/

Zed Shaw wrote:
> Try out the X-Sendfile header, it might work better if you just want
> rails to hand lighty a file.  After that try using webrick and then
> mongrel directly and see if you can get the content-length.  If you
> don''t then you''re doing it wrong.  If you do then lighty
is doing it
> wrong.
Thanks a lot for the suggestion. I can''t seem to get the x-sendfile 
header to do anything, but regardless even if I enter the path directly 
into the browser (which I assume using the x-sendfile header would be 
equivalent to) it seems that lighttpd is insisting on using a chunked 
transfer-encoding instead of setting the content-length (as I would like 
it to). I haven''t trie Mongrel yet, but Webrick seems perfectly happy
to
let me set the content length.  I guess I''ll have to look into 
lighttpd''s documentation a bit more, but I suppose in the worst case 
scenario perhaps we could set apache up to serve the files (grumble).

Thanks again for the help.

Alexis

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

I guess I should have mentioned that lighttpd was behind apache 2.0.40 
and being accessed by mod_proxy via ProxyPass.  It looks like lighttpd 
isn''t doing anything wrong after all - but that mod_proxy is just 
stripping Content-Length from the headers. Will update to Apache 2.0.55 
with fingers crossed.

Alexis

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Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.