Nginx + Ubuntu 9.10, gzip not functioning

Question

So I installed and configured Nginx 0.7.62 on a new Slicehost Ubuntu 9.10 slice.

All seems to work fine with the server, except that gzip isn't working for one reason or another. I made sure that it's setting were correct in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

user www-data;
worker_processes 3;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
    worker_connections 1024;
    # multi_accept on;
}

http {
    include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
    access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;

    sendfile on;
    #tcp_nopush on;

    keepalive_timeout 2;
    tcp_nodelay on;

    gzip on;
    gzip_comp_level 2;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css application/x-javascript;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.";

    include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
    include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

This normally wouldn't be a big deal, but gzip support could save considerable bandwidth for my site. Does anyone have any ideas of what to check, or has anyone else run into this problem?

Answer 1

Thanks for everyone's help. I managed to figure it out... (bizarre, still not sure why)

In Ubuntu 9.10, Nginx 0.7.62:

1. I first tried using gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]."; #still broken
2. I then switched it to gzip_disable "msie6"; #still broken
3. I commented out the gzip_disabled line altogether #fixes the problem

Hope this saves someone else some time.

Answer 2

Passenger now compiles the gzip module upon installing nginx. It's much easier to go this route nowadays

Answer 3

Try putting this into nginx.conf:

gzip on;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_min_length  1100;
gzip_comp_level 1;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_types  text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

Answer 4

at first here is the description to build nginx on linux

http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxInstallOptions

Can you verify that your build support gzip?

  --with-http_gzip_static_module 

Or you didn't build with:

--without-http_gzip_module - Disable ngx_http_gzip_module. Requires zlib if enabled. 

How can you see that the gzip is not working btw.?

Answer 5

All the suggestions from l1x were checked off. Anyone have some ideas? The package was installed using apt-get (so it was pre-compiled)...

Answer 6

Very strange as I just removed the gzip_disable line to resolve my issue. Maybe this is a bug. Worked fine in a previous version of nginx that I was running...