I am using nginx for the first time and have some confusions regarding configurations. I have a nginx as load balancer and backends as nginx as well. With my understanding I have configured mod_security module on the load balancer as its the entry point. I have also added required response headers on the load balancer. Now I have to enable the gzip for nginx. Confusion is where it should be configured? Load balancer or the backend nginx servers?
You can configure gzip globally in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf or just for one site in e.g. /etc/nginx/sites-available/your-site.
The configuration could like this:
gzip on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
It depends.
For dynamic gzipping (e.g. HTML output of your site/app)
If your load balancer is a powerful machine, then you may want to do gzip on the load balancer, in order to reduce CPU usage elsewhere.
If you have some modsecurity rules that require inspecting the response body, and gzipping is done in the nodes, then that would mean that modsecurity needs to ungzip backend response/inspect/re-gzip (and thus cause processing overhead) or those rules would simply not work. That's another case when you want to gzip in load balancer.
In all other cases, I assume gzipping on the nodes would be better.
For static files
.. it's best to rely on static gzip (pre-compress your assets). However, since you have many backends, it means pre-compressing assets on each.
If your backends are different websites/apps (that means, you're not doing actual load balancing), it's not an issue.
If your backends are actual nodes of the same app, then you can do max gzip on each node, and "proxy cache" results on the load balancer.
I want to enable gzip compression on my virtual host with nginx. My control panel is Plesk17 but I have access to server root. I found the vhost nginx config file in this dir:
/etc/nginx/plesk.conf.d/vhosts
and add this codes in server block to enable gzip:
gzip on;
gzip_disable msie6;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_types text/plain application/javascript application/x-javascript text/javascript text/xml text/css;
gzip_vary on;
After all and restarting the nginx, when I check the gzip status, it looks disabled!
For your information, I also have this comments at the top of my config file:
#ATTENTION!
#
#DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE BECAUSE IT WAS GENERATED AUTOMATICALLY,
#SO ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST THE NEXT TIME THE FILE IS GENERATED.
What's wrong? how can I enable the gzip?
To enable gzip compression for particular domain open Domains > example.com > Apache & nginx Settings > Additional nginx directives and add directives to this section.
If you want to enable it server-wide just create new file /etc/nginx/conf.d/gzip.conf add content there and restart nginx.
Scenario: I have two files "style.css" and "style.css.gz". Enabled modules gzip_static and gzip. Everything works properly, NGINX serve compressed "style.css.gz". Both files have the same timestamp. I also have a cronjob that creates pre-compressed files of any file * .css and runs every two hours.
gzip on;
gunzip on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_static always;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 4;
gzip_buffers 32 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_min_length 256;
gzip_types
text/cache-manifest
text/xml
text/css
text/plain
...........
Question: If i edit the "style.css" and change a few CSS rules, is possible to serve edited "style.css" instead of "style.css.gz"? (Based on timestamp or smthing like that) Or pre-compress new "style.css.gz" immediately after i finish editing "style.css"?
It is possible to operate using NGINX? Or what is the best solution?
Thanks
I also have a cronjob that creates pre-compressed files of any file * .css and runs every two hours.
You can just run this script manually after you have made any edit/changes to the css file.
It is possible to operate using NGINX? Or what is the best solution?
Alternatively, another solution I can think of (which is how I roll) is that nginx can actually serve and gzip compress files on the fly. Just make sure to disable use of precompressed files with ngx_http_gzip_static_module otherwise nginx will use the precompressed files instead.
gzip_static off;
Enables (“on”) or disables (“off”) checking the existence of precompressed files.
I am trying to enable gzip compression for components of my website. I have ubuntu 11.04 server and nginx 1.2.
in my nginx configuration of the website, i have this
gzip on;
#gzip_min_length 1000;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javascript text/javascript text/xml application/xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml application/rdf+xml;
#it was gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_buffers 128 4k; #my pagesize is 4
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
and Yslow and google speed measures are advising me to use gzip to reduce transmission over network.
now when i try to curl -I my_js_file i got
curl -I http://www.albawaba.com/sites/default/files/js/js_367664096ca6baf65052749f685cac7b.js
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx/1.2.0
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:15:43 GMT
Content-Type: application/x-javascript
Content-Length: 208463
Connection: keep-alive
Last-Modified: Sun, 14 Apr 2013 10:58:06 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Expires: Thu, 31 Dec 2037 23:55:55 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=315360000
Pragma: public
Cache-Control: public
Accept-Ranges: bytes
any idea of what i have done wrong or what shall i do to get compressed content?
As others have written, it's not enough to enable gzip compression in your server -- the client also needs to ask for it in its requests via the Accept-Encoding: gzip header (or a superset thereof). Modern browsers include this header automatically, but for curl you'll need to include one of the following in your command:
-H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" : You should see the Content-Encoding: gzip header in the response (might need to output headers with curl's -v flag), as well as some seemingly garbled output for the content, the actual gzip stream.
--compressed : You should still see Content-Encoding: gzip in the response headers, but curl knows to decompress the content before outputting it.
I can't find anything obviously wrong with your config, usually gzip on & gzip_types application/x-javascript would be enough to get you going. If everything is working right you'll get a "Content-Encoding:gzip" returned back to you.
PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: I have much more consistency with GOOGLE DEVELOPER TOOLS (curl just doesn't behave the way a browser would).
In Chrome, right click and go to "inspect element" then go to "network" (then reload the page if you have to), then click on a resource and check the header tab, the output should look like this (notice the content-encoding is gzip, yay):
Request URL:https://ssl.gstatic.com/gb/js/sem_a3becc1f55aef317b63a03a400446790.js
Request Method:GET
Status Code:200 OK (from cache)
Response Headersview source
age:199067
cache-control:public, max-age=691200
content-encoding:gzip
content-length:19132
content-type:text/javascript
date:Fri, 12 Apr 2013 06:32:58 GMT
expires:Sat, 20 Apr 2013 06:32:58 GMT
last-modified:Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:48:21 GMT
server:sffe
status:200 OK
vary:Accept-Encoding
version:HTTP/1.1
x-content-type-options:nosniff
x-xss-protection:1; mode=block
Anyway if you are SURE your content is not getting gzipped, I normally get up and running pretty fast with the following:
## Compression
gzip on;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_comp_level 4;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_min_length 1280;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/x-icon image/bmp;
gzip_vary on;
You could try this in replacement for your code, and/or tweak your values one at a time to help you localize your issue.
Remember to restart or reload nginx after changing the config.
It may also be useful to check your logs and see if there's anything interesting there should you still be stuck.
I just changed gzip_http_version 1.1; to be gzip_http_version 1.0; and then it worked
I had to enable gzip in my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf configuration:
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
Please note that I had to add application/javascript to the standard gzip_types configuration.
You need to run:
curl -I --compressed my_js_file
to make curl send an Accept-Encoding header for gzip - the server will only compress content if the client sends a header saying it will accept it.
NB you can write:
gzip_disable "msi6"
rather than using a regex to disable in IE 5.5 and 6, and you needn't specify text/html as a type because it is always compressed as long as gzip is activated.
I am just taking a guess here, but I think you may have to increase your gzip buffer size.
Here are the files that the browser pulls down from the domain. The number on the right is the file download size.
You may not be able to tell from the screen shot, but all of the text content files ARE gzipped, except for the js file you mention in your question. In the screenshot the js file is the file in green, with a size of about 200K. This file size is greater than what you have specified for your gzip buffers (128K).
The Gzip module docs do not really give a good indication as to what the gzip buffers are used for (whether the buffers are used for uncompressed or compressed data). However, the following post seems to indicate that the buffer size should be greater than the uncompressed file size: Large files with NGINX, GZip, and SSL
Here is my nginx configuration and it works.
gzip on;
gzip_min_length 1000;
gzip_buffers 4 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javasc ript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
gzip_vary on;
I think the keypoints are gzip, gzip_disable and gzip_types.
Just like Alaa I had to add gzip_http_version 1.0; (no version was previously specified) for it to work (I tried on Firefox 27.0.0).
I've experienced the same problem as Alaa, and the problem is caused by Antivirus software, that is currently installed on my computer.
Proxy servers and anti-virus software can disable compression when files are downloaded to a client machine. So if you are running web site in a browser on a client machine that is using such anti-virus software, or that sits behind an intermediate proxy server (many proxies are transparent, and you may not even be aware of a proxy intervening between your client and web server), they may be the cause of this issue.
Disabling antivirus solved my problem with browsers and you don't even need to set gzip_http_version to 1.0.
Hope that will help you.
I'm trying to improve page speed on a site and using "Yslow" and "Page Speed" to monitor the speeds. I am being told by both to "compress components with gzip" and given a listing of a number of CSS and JavaScript files, for example
/css/styles.css?v=6.5.5
/jquery.flexslider.js
/4878.js
/6610.js
/homepage.css?v=6.5.5
Our hosting have informed us that nginx is doing the gzip compression on ALL assets, even if it reverse proxies back to Apache and the folllowing values from the nginx site-enable files, which is enabled at a virtual host level, confirms this:
gzip on;
gzip_disable msie6;
gzip_static on;
gzip_comp_level 9;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
Is there a reason these tools are not picking up by the compression or is it in fact they are not being compressed at all and we need to get our hosting to add something extra?
your hosting provider claims that the requests leave nginx compressed that leaves as potential problem causes:
there's a proxy/cache/virusscanner somewhere on the network path between the nginx server and your client that strips out the compression.
your browser saves an uncompressed version of the asset, and yslow/pagespeed ends up using that (if so make sure you trying it with an empty browser-cache should fix it)
you're hosting provider's claim is false (but the posted config bit seems ok to me )
the problem could be a proxy or cache inbetween the nginx server and your browser that strips out the compression.
Some things to try:
Try checking the url's with on online checker for gzip like http://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/ or http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/check_http_gzip.php
check locally what the result of curl --compressed --head <your-asset-url> is (you should see a Content-Type: gzip if the response coming in is compressed)