Disable compression in Net::HTTP

Recently while upgrading to Ruby 2, I found a JSON API call was failing intermittently. The code was failing when I was trying to parse the response using JSON.parse. Investigating further, I found that the call was successful; but for some calls the response was different than the response for others. Looking at the response, I found it was not JSON at all. It looked like the following.

\x8B\x00\x00\x8C...

I had no clue as to what to make out of such a response. Reading up on it, I found out that the above might be a compressed response. It appeared that the server had the liberty of choosing whether to compress the response or not and whenever the response was uncompressed, my code was working fine. Looking into improvements introduced in Ruby 2, I found that Net::HTTP now automatically requests gzip and deflate compression by default. All I needed to do was to stop doing that and ask for uncompressed response. As my response was rather small, it would hardly matter. To request uncompressed response, I just needed to add the following header to my requests.

'Accept-Encoding' => 'identity'

Remove X-Powered-By header in Nginx server

It is often desired to remove the 'X-Powered-By' from the HTTP headers. When using Nginx, it can be using a simple setting. The setting has to be in http section and it takes the following form.

<module_name>_hide_header X-Powered-By;

For example, if it is a FastCGI server the configuration setting will be as follows:

fastcgi_hide_header X-Powered-By;

If you are using Nginx as a load balancer, the configuration setting will be as follows:

proxy_hide_header X-Powered-By;

Unfortunately this configuration setting is not available yet in Passenger because Passenger is a thord party module and they have not implemented it yet.