dhis2-users team mailing list archive

[Lars Helge Øverland <larshelge@xxxxxxxxx>]

To sys admins,

I was recently made aware that nginx by default will not gzip / compress
responses coming from the DHIS 2 Web API.

The reason turned out to be that DHIS 2 serves content with the charset
specified as part of the content-type, e.g.

*Content-type:application/json;charset=utf-8*

This is not caught by the default nginx configuration so you need to
explicitly define it.

This change will have a significant impact on load time and performance as
static javascript, css and json Web API json responses now will be
compressed before sent to the browser.

I have updated the install guide with a reasonable *gzip_types* value:

http://dhis2.github.io/dhis2-docs/master/en/implementer/html/ch08s04.html#d5e575

http {
  gzip on; # Enables compression, incl Web API content-types
  gzip_types
    "application/json;charset=utf-8" application/json
    "application/javascript;charset=utf-8" application/javascript
text/javascript
    "application/xml;charset=utf-8" application/xml text/xml
    "text/css;charset=utf-8" text/css
    "text/plain;charset=utf-8" text/plain;


You can verify that content is compressed by looking for this header in the
response:

*Content-Encoding: gzip*


regards,

Lars



-- 
Lars Helge Øverland
Lead developer, DHIS 2
University of Oslo
Skype: larshelgeoverland
http://www.dhis2.org <https://www.dhis2.org>