Brotli Static

Brotli static works with the dynamic Brotli module to serve pre-compressed files. When a request comes in with Accept-Encoding: br, nginx looks for a .br version of the file on disk. If it finds one, that gets served. No CPU, no on-the-fly compression. Good for assets that rarely change: JS bundles, CSS, fonts, JSON manifests. Compress them once in your build pipeline (brotli CLI, webpack plugin, Vite plugin) and deploy alongside the originals. The dynamic module covers anything that has no pre-compressed version.

• Serve compressed JS bundles and CSS without runtime CPU overhead
• Reduce server resource usage on high-traffic static asset endpoints
• Combine with the dynamic brotli module for complete coverage
• Deploy pre-compressed files from CI/CD pipelines with no nginx config changes

A starting point. Adjust to taste.

location /static/ {
  root /var/www/html;
  brotli_static on;
  gzip_static   on;  # gzip fallback for older clients
}

You'll need nginx from nginx.org configured first. These packages won't load on the distro nginx. Then add the Blendbyte repository if you haven't already:

sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings

curl -fsSL https://apt.blendbyte.net/nginx/blendbyte-archive-keyring.gpg \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/keyrings/blendbyte.gpg >/dev/null

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/blendbyte.gpg] https://apt.blendbyte.net/nginx $(lsb_release -cs) main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blendbyte.list

sudo apt update
sudo apt install nginx-module-brotli-static

Most modules auto-enable on install. If yours didn't:

$ sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/modules-available/50-mod-brotli-static.conf \
  /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/
$ sudo nginx -t && sudo systemctl reload nginx

This replaces libnginx-mod-http-brotli-static from the old Sury nginx repository. The package declares Replaces and Conflicts, so once your apt sources point at nginx.org and Blendbyte, a regular apt upgrade swaps it in. No manual cleanup.

Switching sources also moves you from Sury's nginx binary to nginx.org's. The migration guide walks through it in one go.

We package this from the upstream open-source project. If it's a bug in the module itself (not in our packaging), report it upstream at github.com/google/ngx_brotli ↗