TYPO free

Nginx comes with a lot of modules. You can read all about them on the Nginx wiki. The syntax of the configuration files differs from Apache syntax, but up to now everything I need is possible. There are also a lot of nifty new features like an empty gif configuration. We can use this to serve an empty gif right from memory without having to read the clear.gif file from disk:

location = /clear.gif {
  empty_gif;
}

That's cool! :-) But setting up gzip and expires headers in Nginx is also easy.

NginxHttpGzipModule

Nginx comes with the NginxHttpGzipModule which can compress files 'on the fly'. Nginx also comes with a gzip pre-compression module, but that is not enabled in the Debian version. Here is my configuration for the 'on the fly' compression:

gzip on;
gzip_http_version   1.1;
gzip_min_length     1000;
gzip_buffers        16 8k;
gzip_disable        "MSIE [1-6] \.";
gzip_types          text/html text/css text/xml application/x-javascript application/atom+xml text/mathml text/plain text/vnd.sun.j2me.app-descriptor text/vnd.wap.wml text/x-component
gzip_vary           on;

The Nginx 'context' for the gzip options is: http, server, location. I put this configuration on the http level because I want all text format files to be compressed.

NginxHttpHeadersModule

To send expires headers, you will need the HTTP headers module. This is the server level configuration I use to send expires headers:

if ($request_uri ~* "\.(ico|gif|png|jpe?g|css|js|swf)(\?v\d\.\d\.\d)?$") {
  expires max;
  break;
} 

This will send expires headers for files like:

• www.s2.typofree.org/fileadmin/site/typofree.org/style/main.css
• www.s2.typofree.org/fileadmin/site/typofree.org/image/Sound.16.png

And YES, I want those files cached indefinitely.

Update, 2009 august 12

I now use the following to support two digit version numbers:

if ($request_uri ~* "\.(ico|gif|png|jpe?g|css|js|swf)(\?v\d\d?\.\d\d?\.\d\d?)?$") {
  expires max;
  break;
}