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Enable GZIP Compression on nginx Servers

By David Walsh on July 16, 2014

Speed kills, and there's nothing like a speedy website. When you come to this blog, I want you to have a great experience, which is why I've worked tirelessly to compress every asset and avoid unnecessary synchronous interactions. In reviewing my site with Google Pagespeed Insights, I noticed that my virtual private server from Media Temple wasn't configured to serve assets gzip compressed. Oh no! Here's how I enabled gzip compression and made my site miles faster!

Create a file at /etc/nginx/conf.d/gzip.conf with the following content:

gzip on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_types text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

With that file now in place, restart your server and you will now be serving site assets with gzip compression. Google takes site speed into account when ranking and placing your sites in their search engine so do your users a favor and strive for the fastest site possible -- especially for mobile users!

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Discussion

Vikas Kapadiya
You can use

gzip_comp_level 1

Sets a gzip compression level of a response. Acceptable values are in the range from 1 to 9.

Vikas
Nice article, I also like to use gzip_min_length parameter which reduces some overhead to gzip small responses.

RoseHosting
To test if gzip is enabled, run:
```
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" -I http://davidwalsh.name/
```
You should see content-encoding: gzip
Sean Hsien
For production systems, I would suggest the use of gzip_static.
Marlin Gezker
If you want to quickly test whether GZIP is enabled on your website or not use this tool: http://www.giftofspeed.com/gzip-test/
Saved me a lot of time. It also shows you the compression percentages and stuff (for some of my pages it was 70% or more! :-))
punzme
so gzip is only work on text type content?

samir

gzip_types text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript text/javascript application/xml+rss;

I prefer this line as this enables for javascript too

Brent
This snippet made it so when I restarted nginx it failed. Not sure what the deal is. Just an FYI for anyone planning to follow those directions exactly.

Flawid
nginx fails to restart because sometimes you’ll have gzip already enabled.
So removing the line “gzip on;” or commenting it with a # should do the job!
Sidati
If you are using Ubuntu 10.04 just execute this command “sudo nginx”, and it shows you where is the problem if exist, my Nginx fails because this line “gzip on;”.
It seems Gzip already ON but no configuration was set.

Samir Khanal
Hey Brent,
That depends on where you put the code and how you did it.
Can you share your error So I can help.
Francis Kim
I put the code into my website config file at /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/foobar.com/ and it works 100%
Rafael
Consider the addition of application/javascript. More in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23939722/nginx-gzip-not-compressing-javascript-files