A quiet nginx setup for a static site

Servers · 4 min read

Most of my small sites are a folder of HTML files behind nginx. The configuration stays short on purpose: every line I add is a line I have to remember in a year.

The core

A server block, a root and an index file already make a working site. The first thing I add on top is a proper try_files, so unknown paths return a clean 404 instead of some odd fallback:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.org;
    root /var/www/html;
    index index.html;

    location / {
        try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
    }
}

Small things worth having

server_tokens off; hides the nginx version from headers and error pages. It does not make anything secure, it just stops advertising.
gzip for text types (HTML, CSS, plain text). Images are already compressed, so leave them out.
A long cache lifetime for files with a version in their name, and a short one for HTML, so edits show up quickly.

What I leave out

No rewrite rules and no regular-expression locations unless I can explain them in one sentence. If I cannot, the config is doing something I do not understand, and that is how small sites turn into a puzzle.

Check before you reload

Always test the file first, and only reload if the test passes:

nginx -t && systemctl reload nginx

The && matters. A reload with a broken config can leave the old workers running, and it is easy to assume the change went live when it did not.