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Enable gzip compression in Nginx

As with many modern web servers, enabling gzip compression can be fairly easy. If you’re using Nginx, you can modify your nginx.conf to enable gzip compression with several different directives. Open the nginx.conf file and add the following:

gzip  on;
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/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

To make sure that gzip doesn’t lose bigger gzipped javascript or css files, you can set buffers as well. This will assign the number and the size of the buffers into which to store the compressed response. If unset, the size of one buffer is equal to the size of page, depending on platform this either 4K or 8K. :

gzip_buffers 16 8k;

You’ll also want to disable compression for some older browsers. To do this, we can use some regex magic to make an exception for IE6 SP1:

gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";

One of the best features is the ability to set the compression level. The compression level can be set between 1 and 9, where 1 is the least compression (fastest) and 9 is the most (slowest). For further information on this directive and others, please check out the official Nginx module page.