Opened 3 years ago

Last modified 23 months ago

#2349 closed enhancement

Support range requests in requests served via gzip_static — at Initial Version

Reported by: CAFxX@… Owned by:
Priority: minor Milestone:
Component: nginx-module Version:
Keywords: Cc:
uname -a: Linux 02dfaaf22c02 5.10.104-linuxkit #1 SMP Wed Mar 9 19:05:23 UTC 2022 x86_64 Linux
nginx -V: nginx version: nginx/1.21.6
built by gcc 10.3.1 20211027 (Alpine 10.3.1_git20211027)
built with OpenSSL 1.1.1l 24 Aug 2021 (running with OpenSSL 1.1.1n 15 Mar 2022)
TLS SNI support enabled
configure arguments: --prefix=/etc/nginx --sbin-path=/usr/sbin/nginx --modules-path=/usr/lib/nginx/modules --conf-path=/etc/nginx/nginx.conf --error-log-path=/var/log/nginx/error.log --http-log-path=/var/log/nginx/access.log --pid-path=/var/run/nginx.pid --lock-path=/var/run/nginx.lock --http-client-body-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/client_temp --http-proxy-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/proxy_temp --http-fastcgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/fastcgi_temp --http-uwsgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/uwsgi_temp --http-scgi-temp-path=/var/cache/nginx/scgi_temp --with-perl_modules_path=/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl --user=nginx --group=nginx --with-compat --with-file-aio --with-threads --with-http_addition_module --with-http_auth_request_module --with-http_dav_module --with-http_flv_module --with-http_gunzip_module --with-http_gzip_static_module --with-http_mp4_module --with-http_random_index_module --with-http_realip_module --with-http_secure_link_module --with-http_slice_module --with-http_ssl_module --with-http_stub_status_module --with-http_sub_module --with-http_v2_module --with-mail --with-mail_ssl_module --with-stream --with-stream_realip_module --with-stream_ssl_module --with-stream_ssl_preread_module --with-cc-opt='-Os -fomit-frame-pointer -g' --with-ld-opt=-Wl,--as-needed,-O1,--sort-common

Description

As discussed in https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,209738,210053#msg-210053 nginx currently does not support range requests in responses that include Content-Encoding: gzip, the valid argument being that the industry-wide misuse of Content-Encoding: gzip in place of the more appropriate Transfer-Encoding: gzip for responses that are gzip-compressed on the fly makes it exceedingly hard to be able to satisfy such range requests.

It is worth noting though that this argument does not apply to responses served by gzip_static, as in this case the content is actually already gzip-encoded, and the length and ETag of the encoded content are known, and therefore satisfying the HTTP semantics of range requests + content-encoding is not difficult.

I would therefore suggest that, for responses that gzip_static can satisfy, the gzip_static module should add Accept-Ranges: bytes to the response (in addition to the Etag/Last-Modified/Content-Encoding headers that are already added), and add support for handling the Range: <ranges> and If-Range: <etag>/<lastmod> request headers in accordance with the HTTP spec (i.e. serve byte ranges interpreted as referring to the gzip-encoded resource; if an If-Range header is present in the request and it matches the current gzip-encoded resource, send 206 and the requested range, otherwise send 200 and the full gzip-encoded resource).

If we are worried this may break some non-compliant clients, it may be worthwhile to add an option to enable/disable range requests in gzip_static.

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