enable gzip compression with nginx

As others have written, it's not enough to enable gzip compression in your server -- the client also needs to ask for it in its requests via the Accept-Encoding: gzip header (or a superset thereof). Modern browsers include this header automatically, but for curl you'll need to include one of the following in your command:

• -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" : You should see the Content-Encoding: gzip header in the response (might need to output headers with curl's -v flag), as well as some seemingly garbled output for the content, the actual gzip stream.
• --compressed : You should still see Content-Encoding: gzip in the response headers, but curl knows to decompress the content before outputting it.

I can't find anything obviously wrong with your config, usually gzip on & gzip_types application/x-javascript would be enough to get you going. If everything is working right you'll get a "Content-Encoding:gzip" returned back to you.

PLEASE KEEP IN MIND: I have much more consistency with GOOGLE DEVELOPER TOOLS (curl just doesn't behave the way a browser would).

In Chrome, right click and go to "inspect element" then go to "network" (then reload the page if you have to), then click on a resource and check the header tab, the output should look like this (notice the content-encoding is gzip, yay):

Request URL:https://ssl.gstatic.com/gb/js/sem_a3becc1f55aef317b63a03a400446790.js
Request Method:GET
Status Code:200 OK (from cache)
Response Headersview source
age:199067
cache-control:public, max-age=691200
content-encoding:gzip
content-length:19132
content-type:text/javascript
date:Fri, 12 Apr 2013 06:32:58 GMT
expires:Sat, 20 Apr 2013 06:32:58 GMT
last-modified:Sat, 23 Mar 2013 01:48:21 GMT
server:sffe
status:200 OK
vary:Accept-Encoding
version:HTTP/1.1
x-content-type-options:nosniff
x-xss-protection:1; mode=block

Anyway if you are SURE your content is not getting gzipped, I normally get up and running pretty fast with the following:

## Compression
gzip              on;
gzip_buffers      16 8k;
gzip_comp_level   4;
gzip_http_version 1.0;
gzip_min_length   1280;
gzip_types        text/plain text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript image/x-icon image/bmp;
gzip_vary         on;

You could try this in replacement for your code, and/or tweak your values one at a time to help you localize your issue.

Remember to restart or reload nginx after changing the config.

It may also be useful to check your logs and see if there's anything interesting there should you still be stuck.

I had to enable gzip in my /etc/nginx/nginx.conf configuration:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

Please note that I had to add application/javascript to the standard gzip_types configuration.

I just changed gzip_http_version 1.1; to be gzip_http_version 1.0; and then it worked