Brotli Compression

Install

You'll need nginx from nginx.org configured first. These packages won't load on the distro nginx.

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:

$ 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 Google's compression algorithm. It squeezes text content 15-25% smaller than gzip at comparable speeds, and every major browser has supported it for years. nginx doesn't ship it. This module fixes that. Compression happens on the fly based on the Accept-Encoding header. If you'd rather pre-compress assets at build time and skip the per-request CPU work, pair it with nginx-module-brotli-static.

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. Adjust to taste.

# 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

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.

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