Basic caching headers in nginx

05 Jan, 2020

To add basic caching headers for different filetypes, add an expires directive to your nginx config file, like this:

# Expires map
map $sent_http_content_type $expires {
    default                    off;
    text/html                  epoch;
    text/css                   30d;
    application/javascript     30d;
    ~image/                    30d;
    ~font                      max;
}

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    listen [::]:80 default_server;

    expires $expires;
    ...

off means no caching headers.
epoch is no caching, ask the website itself.
30d cache for 30 days.
max is the maximum, cache as long as you can.
A ~ in the mimetype indicates a regular expression.

Fonts

It could be that this does not work right away for fonts, as nginx defaults to the application/octet-stream mimetype for those filetypes. To fix this, add these lines to the /etc/nginx/mime.types config file:

font/ttf             ttf;
font/opentype        otf;
font/woff            woff;
font/woff2           woff2;

Don't forget to add the first two to the list of gzipped mimetypes, the last two already have compression baked into the format:

gzip_types text/plain text/css ... font/ttf font/opentype;

In /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (on Debian).

ewintr.nl

Basic caching headers in nginx

Fonts

Sources