Enable Expires Headers, gzip compression on nginx
This post covers 2 section which helps to boost the website performance. As we know, nginx is fast webserver and we are going to improve the performance by tweaking few more parameters on nginx. If the server doesn’t have nginx installed then follow the post .
Assumption:
- Nginx webserver
- Centos or Ubuntu server
- Installation path:/etc/nginx/
1. Enable Expires headers on Nginx:
Open site configuration file. Let’s assume that, we have only one website on the server and the nginx configuration file “/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default“, the document root would be /var/www/html.
We are going to add expires header for the following static content files.
ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png
vi /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default
Add the following content under server {
location ~* \.(?:ico|css|js|gif|jpe?g|png)$ {
expires 30d;
add_header Pragma public;
add_header Cache-Control “public”;
}
Check the syntax of the nginx configuration
nginx -t
Make sure that there is no error in the configuration.
systemctl restart nginx
Verification:
Execute the following command to verify expires command.
curl -I http://domain.tld/css/assets.min.css
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2016 05:51:07 GMT
ETag: “585cede3-4d843”
Expires: Fri, 27 Jan 2017 05:51:07 GMT
Last-Modified: Fri, 23 Dec 2016 09:26:59 GMT
Enable gzip compression:
Open nginx configuration file.
vi /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Enable/Edit/Append the following line on configuration
gzip on;
gzip_disable “msie6”;gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/x-icon image/svg+xml text/js;
Check the nginx configuration
nginx -t
Restart the nginx service.
systemctl restart nginx
Verification:
Execute the following command to verify whether gzip enabled.
curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" https://domain.tld/css/asset.min.css
Cache-Control: max-age=2592000
Cache-Control: public
Content-Encoding: gzip
