Node.js: chunked transfer encoding

Question

Is that code valid HTTP/1.1?

var fs = require(\'fs\')
var http = require(\'http\')

var buf=function(res,fd,i,s,buffer){
 if(i+buffer.length

        

Answer 1

If you're doing chunked transfer encoding, you actually need to set that header:

Transfer-Encoding: chunked

You can see from the headers returned by google, which does chunked transfers for the homepage and most likely other pages:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 00:04:08 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=f9c65f4927515ce7:FF=0:TM=1307145848:LM=1307145848:S=fB58RFtpI5YeXdU9; expires=Mon, 03-Jun-2013 00:04:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com
Set-Cookie: NID=47=UiPfl5ew2vCEte9JyBRkrFk4EhRQqy4dRuzG5Y-xeE---Q8AVvPDQq46GYbCy9VnOA8n7vxR8ETEAxKCh-b58r7elfURfiskmrOCgU706msiUx8L9qBpw-3OTPsY-6tl; expires=Sun, 04-Dec-2011 00:04:08 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com; HttpOnly
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

EDIT Yikes, that read is way too complicated:

var app = function(req,res){
 var head={'Content-Type':'text/html'}
 switch(req.url.slice(-3)){
  case '.js':head={'Content-Type':'text/javascript'};break;
  case 'css':head={'Content-Type':'text/css'};break;
  case 'png':head={'Content-Type':'image/png'};break;
  case 'ico':head={'Content-Type':'image/x-icon'};break;
  case 'ogg':head={'Content-Type':'audio/ogg'};break;
  case 'ebm':head={'Content-Type':'video/webm'};break;
 }
 res.writeHead(200,head)
 var file_stream = fs.createReadStream('.'+req.url);
 file_stream.on("error", function(exception) {
   console.error("Error reading file: ", exception);
 });
 file_stream.on("data", function(data) {
   res.write(data);
 });
 file_stream.on("close", function() {
   res.end();
 });
}

There you go, a nice streamed buffer for you to write with. Here's a blog post I wrote on different ways to read in files. I recommend looking that over so you can see how to best work with files in node's asynchronous environment.

Answer 2

Why are you doing all the fs operations manually? You'd probably be better off using the fs.createReadStream() function.

On top of that, my guess is that Chrome is expecting you to return a 206 response code. Check req.headers.range, and see if Chrome is expecting a "range" of the media file to be returned. If it is, then you will have to only send back the portion of the file requested by the web browser.

By why reinvent the wheel? There's tons of node modules that do this sort of thing for you. Try Connect/Express' static middleware. Good luck!

Answer 3

Since Node.js implicitly sets 'Transfer-Encoding: chunked', all I needed to send in headers was the content type with charset like:

'Content-Type': 'text/html; charset=UTF-8'

Initially it was:

'Content-Type': 'text/html'

... which didn't work. Specifying "charset=UTF-8" immediately forced Chrome to render chunked responses.