Content Length and Transfer Encoding Chunked nginx, node-http-proxy

Solution 1:

From RFC 2616 - "The presence of a message-body in a request is signaled by the inclusion of a Content-Length or Transfer-Encoding header field in the request's message-headers.". So I think nginx is right in expecting a Content-Length since it thinks it has a message-body.

You can try explicitly setting Content-Length to 0.
Also try: http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpChunkinModule

Solution 2:

I have experienced exactly the same issue in my set-up. Details can be found here: http://development.blog.saw.sonyx.net/2012/11/http-delete-failing-with-411.html

I ended up with patching http-proxy to add content-length for DELETE requests. You can find patch on my fork of http-proxy here:

https://github.com/ian7/node-http-proxy/commit/642a838093286da3b3b84726e38dcf3f8748f7f0