Gzip compression with NGINX

Gzip compression with NGINX

20 Apr 2016 4 min read

We often do some server administration job for the server we work on and host our corporate and client sites which are at development.  One day we decided to turn GZIP compression on at the server to speed up the HTTP packets downloading.  Although it seemed to be a trivial task, but it turned out that a good manual, that could clearly explain how to do it for Nginx on Centos 7, was difficult to find.

Eventually after we have successfully coped with this problem, we decided our experience is going to be useful and set up such a manual.

ngx_http_gzip_module – it’s such a filter that reduce size of transmitted data to twice or more by compressing response with Gzip.

Activate GZIP on Nginx in this file   /usr/local/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

http {
...
# Enable / Disable the gzip compression
gzip on;
# The minimum size of compressing file, in bytes
gzip_min_length 1000;
# Set the buffer size for all proxy requests
gzip_proxied any;
# MIME types that should be compressed
# gzip_types text/plain text/html text/xml application/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript text/css text/json;
# If there are warnings, like "duplicate MIME type text/html", then you should exclude text/html
#gzip_types text/plain text/xml application/xml application/x-javascript text/javascript text/css text/json;
# It is forbidden to use Gzip compression for IE6
gzip_disable "msie6";
# Level of Gzip compression
gzip_comp_level 8;
...
}

Be sure restart the Nginx.

Now if you want to test how Gzip compression is working on Nginx, please follow next.

[my@lan ~]$ curl --header "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch" -I http://www.scalescale.com/tips/nginx
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 15:41:38 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Pingback: http://www.scalescale.com/tips/nginx/xmlrpc.php
Content-Encoding: gzip

We hope you would find it useful!

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