Brotli Compression

Install

Make sure you have the official nginx.org repository configured first. These packages require nginx from nginx.org, not the distro-bundled version.

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

Then install this module:

$ sudo apt install nginx-module-brotli

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

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

What it does

Brotli is a general-purpose lossless compression algorithm developed at Google. Compared to gzip at equivalent speeds, it squeezes text content 15-25% smaller. Every major browser has supported it for years. nginx does not ship with it. This module fixes that. It works dynamically: nginx compresses responses on the fly based on the Accept-Encoding request header. Pair it with nginx-module-brotli-static if you want to pre-compress files at build time and skip the CPU cost entirely.

When to use it

• Reduce bandwidth usage and page load times for HTML, CSS, and JS assets
• Improve Core Web Vitals scores by shrinking Time to First Byte on text content
• Replace or supplement gzip compression without touching application code
• Serve smaller API responses to JavaScript clients

Configuration

A starting-point configuration. Adjust to your setup.

# Inside your http {} block:
brotli on;
brotli_comp_level 6;
brotli_types
  text/html
  text/css
  text/plain
  application/javascript
  application/json
  application/xml
  image/svg+xml;

# If you were using Sury, this upgrades in place:
sudo apt install nginx-module-brotli

Upstream project

This module is packaged from the upstream open-source project. Bug reports about module behaviour (not packaging) should go upstream.

https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli ↗