How to serve giziped text files with nginx

Question

To save space we gzip all our logs and text files and these files are browsed by the user, but these files are downloaded instead of opened in the browser, I couldn't find a way to set mime-type text/plain for such files e.g. this does not work

types {
    text/plain txt txt.gz log.gz
}

So is there a way in nginx to tell txt.gz and log.gz files are to be served as text/plain ?

Answer 1

Set up nginx gzip_static

example:

location / {
gzip_static on
}

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_static_module.html

Answer 2

This worked for me, basically match location based on txt.gz extension and then for such files, set correct encoding and mime type:

location ~* /my/data/.*txt.gz$ {
    add_header  Content-Encoding  gzip;
    gzip off;
    types { text/plain gz; };
    root /;
}

Answer 3

Nginx can't just decompress these files before serving them. You'd need some sort of script that does this for you then serves the results to the user. Attempting to force the .gz file as text will just result in garbage output.