Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Serving SQLite database files with sql.js-httpvfs broken due to gzip encoding on HEAD requests

Open
#952 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
sqlite

Research direction

No repository file or test is identified. Start by reproducing the HEAD and Range requests against GitHub Pages for a SQLite file, then compare the content-encoding and content-length headers; the investigation is done when the serving behavior is confirmed and a supported workaround is documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

I have been using GitHub Pages to serve SQLite database files for a client-side app with sql.js-httpvfs, which requires HTTP Range requests to read parts of the database file.

Until recently, this setup worked correctly. However, now the sql.js-httpvfs worker throws an error:
Length of the file not known. It must either be supplied in the config or given by the HTTP server.

Upon inspecting the HTTP response headers, I see that HEAD requests respond with content-encoding: gzip. According to sql.js-httpvfs, this breaks range requests because the server returns compressed data on HEAD but serves uncompressed data on range requests, making the byte length calculation incorrect.

Example response headers from a HEAD request:
content-encoding: gzip accept-ranges: bytes content-length: 1288
This behavior causes sql.js-httpvfs to fail when trying to read the file size and ranges properly.

Could you please confirm if there has been a recent change in how GitHub Pages serves static files or handles gzip encoding on HEAD and Range requests? Is there a recommended workaround to properly serve files that need range requests without gzip interfering?

Thank you very much for your help!

Dominant language
Ruby
Stars
1.9k
Forks
361
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from github/pages-gem

All issues in github/pages-gem

Similar issues

More Ruby issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.