Comments on: Setting Static Asset Expires Headers with nginx and Passenger

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:33:02 +0000

@eno,

Interesting. I’m wondering if this isn’t an nginx version issue, because the regexp I use in the example works fine for me on my website.

But both you and Adam are saying the check against $location doesn’t work, I’m wondering if its because the $location variable changed in nginx.

what version are you running? I’m running version 0.6.36 on the server in question.

By: eno

eno — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:11:25 +0000

Hey craig, me again :) Hongli Lai’s example does not work (as Adam already pointed out, because the location test does not include the URL arguments in the test against the regex. Adam’s solution seems ok to me. My own setup is a bit different; if interested check it out here http://radiospiel.org/0×29-my-nginx-config.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:19:35 +0000

@eno,

You are correct. Good eye.

I’ve gone ahead and updated the regexp in my example.

By: eno

eno — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:15:51 +0000

Hey craig, I think that your regexp doesn’t match “jpeg” file extensions, but (wrongly) “jg”.

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:41:41 +0000

Adam, my second regexp (the one I am actually using) does the same thing as your example.

By: Adam Byrtek

Adam Byrtek — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:39:21 +0000

Your first regular expression doesn’t match anything, as nginx doesn’t include query string (part after the question mark) when matching location.

I prefer to set Expires *only* for assets with timestamp included, otherwise your users will have problems when you change the contents of a file without changing the name.

The following directive will cover this case:

location ~* \.(ico|css|js|gif|jp?g|png) {
if ($args ~* [0-9]+$) {
expires max;
break;
}
}

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 06:29:16 +0000

Another big thank you!! This just helped me finally get expire headers working right on UniversityTutor.com

It’s loading way faster now. Thanks a ton!

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:06:52 +0000

awesome. glad to help

By: chris

chris — Thu, 21 May 2009 20:01:59 +0000

Thanks for this! After hours of trying to figure this out this finally helped me!