Static location with nginx downloading file instead of showing response - nginx

Question

I've read about this problem with php a numerous amount of times by now. I'm trying to get the basic of nginx since I almost exclusively used apache or iis.
I'm running a small debian 9 server and trying to figure out the basics of the nginx config.
the nginx.conf file is mostely untouched by me.
user www-data;
worker_processes auto;
pid /run/nginx.pid;
include /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/*.conf;
events {
worker_connections 768;
}
http {
sendfile on;
tcp_nopush on;
tcp_nodelay on;
keepalive_timeout 65;
types_hash_max_size 2048;
include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
default_type application/octet-stream;
ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; # Dropping SSLv3, ref: POODLE
ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}
The default.conf file however is edited by me:
server {
listen 80 default_server;
listen [::]:80 default_server;
server_name 10.20.30.1;
root /var/www;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
}
when accessing via IP, I get everything from my /var/www folder correctly loaded up with css files. So the including mime-type is working quite well.
after adding:
location /greet {
return 200 "Hello User!";
}
to the server configuration I'm able to access http://10.20.30.1/greet but instead of displaying the message within the browser it's being downloaded as a file without extension, called greet with my message inside.
I found many simular problems like mine regarding php. In this case php shouldn't even be an issue by now.
Any advice would be very helpful.
thank you in advance!

Answer 1

That return statement literally sends a text response with the default content type. If the browser does not understand how to present a given content type, it will offer to download the file.
You can tell the browser that it's plain text using the default_type directive.
For example:
location /greet {
default_type text/plain;
return 200 "Hello User!";
}