Posted on by Anh

Enable Gzip on NGINX

Edit config file

Enabling Gzip in Nginx is very easy, and will save us bandwidth transfer and also takes less time to load the pages.

Edit the file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and add the following code to the http section:

# enable gzip
gzip on;
gzip_min_length  1100;
gzip_buffers  4 32k;
gzip_types    text/plain application/x-javascript text/xml text/css;
gzip_vary on;
  • gzip on – turns on/off gzip compression
  • gzip_min_length 1100 – the minimum file-size to be compressed
  • gzip_buffers 4 32k – specify buffer size of gzip
  • gzip_types text/plain application/x-javascript text/xml text/css – specify which file types should be compressed
  • gzip_vary on – enables response header

Save the config file and reload Nginx:

/etc/init.d/nginx reload

Testing Gzip

To test Gzip compression is working on Nginx run:

[root@atran72 ~]# curl --header "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch" -I https://www.anhsblog.com/blog
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.4.3
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 21:19:02 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Connection: keep-alive
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.3
X-Pingback: https://www.anhsblog.com/blog/xmlrpc.php
Content-Encoding: gzip

You should see ‘Content-Encoding: gzip‘.