Turn off gzip for a location in Nginx

Question

How can gzip be turned off for a particular location and all its sub-directories? My main site is at http://mydomain.com and I want to turn gzip off for both http://mydomain.com/foo and http://mydomain.com/foo/bar. gzip is turned on in nginx.conf.

I tried turning off gzip as shown below, but the Response Headers in Chrome's dev tools shows that Content-Encoding:gzip.

How should gzip/output buffering be disabled properly?

Attempt:

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name www.mydomain.com mydomain.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    root /var/www/mydomain/public;

    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
        gzip on;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
    }

    location /foo/ {
        gzip off;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
    }

}

---

UPDATE

I turned off gzip in nginx.conf and tried using named locations. However gzip is now always off, and gzip on; in the location / block does not seem to turn gzip back on. Any ideas?

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name www.mydomain.com mydomain.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    root /var/www/mydomain/public;

    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ @php;
    }

    location /foo/ {
        try_files $uri $uri/ @php_nogzip;
    }

    location @php {
        gzip on;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
    }

    location @php_nogzip {
        gzip off;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args ;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
    }

}

Solution 1

I'd suppose that URLs you're requesting are being handled with try_files inside location ^~ /foo/ and due to absence of those files, they're internally re-directed to another location handler not having gzip off inherited.

Try using "named location" in /foo location, and then define that "named" location @fooNoGzip with gzip off inside and fascgi_pass stuff.

Solution 2

Just for the sake of some necro-romancy: the updated nginx configuration of the OP wasn't working because it's handled ultimately by \.php$ location block.

The proper solution would be removing it and making the named locations as the ones forwarding requests to FastCGI (PHP-FPM):

server {
    listen   80;
    server_name www.mydomain.com mydomain.com;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
    root /var/www/mydomain/public;

    index index.php index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ @php;
    }

    location /foo/ {
        try_files $uri $uri/ @php_nogzip;
    }

    location @php {
        gzip on;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
    }

    location @php_nogzip {
        gzip off;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_read_timeout 300;
    }
}

Comments

[Admin]

Is your application compressing its response?

[poige]

@Nyxynyx, solved?

[anup]

This helped me. Turning off gzip was the right solution. However the down side is that it applied to all *.php. So, text/html for all php processed pages are not compressed. We do have CDN over Varnish which will cache pages for lower TTL and that does the Gzip at last mile.

[Danila Vershinin]

This will never work. The gzip configuration directive only allows to be set in configuration directly and is not evaluated from a string variable produced by map.

[higuita]

@DanilaVershinin i never tested this, but if gzip do not accept variables and you need this, i would suggest open a bug in nginx, they are always adding support for more variable settings and this one looks like it would be useful for some people