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Asked: 2020-08-25 14:29:56 +0800 CST

How to Enable Immediate CGI Line Outputs With Nginx, Without Waiting for a CGI Script to Finish?

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I have a perl and shell script that process a bunch of data and output results as they happen, like:

5 processed in 0.58 seconds.
10 processed in 0.79 seconds.
...
150 processed in 0.65 seconds. DONE!

etc.

However, when I visit the URL with Chrome, it shows nothing, waits until the script finishes, then shows the entire output at once. Is there a way to configure nginx to show each line output as it happens? I used to be able to do this with Apache.

I put gzip off in the nginx config, thinking this could nginx waiting to compress the text before sending it to the client, but that did not help.

I also tried buffer-flushing techniques in the scripts themselves, like these lines at the top of my Perl scripts:

use IO::Handle;
$| ++;
STDERR->autoflush(1);
STDOUT->autoflush(1);
print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

Relevant parts of the nginx config look like this

  ssl on;
  root /my/path/cgi ;
  proxy_read_timeout 900s ;
  fastcgi_read_timeout 900s ;
  fastcgi_request_buffering off ;
  gzip off ;
  location ~ \.pl|cgi$ {
    try_files $uri =404;
    gzip off;
    fastcgi_pass  unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
    include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params;
    fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME  $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
  }

Any ideas?

cgi fastcgi nginx

1 Answers

  1. You need to tell nginx to not buffer the response from the FastCGI server, with fastcgi_buffering off;.

    From the docs:

    When buffering is disabled, the response is passed to a client synchronously, immediately as it is received. nginx will not try to read the whole response from the FastCGI server. The maximum size of the data that nginx can receive from the server at a time is set by the fastcgi_buffer_size directive.

    Which you may also need to tweak.

    But in general, a plain HTML web page is probably not the best interface for whatever it is you're doing.

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