No, this post isn't related to Sitecore, but recently I've been working on a site which runs on an Azure App Service box running Linux. These boxes run nginx under the hood (which you can see by SSHing in), which is set up to use gzip for common formats (including your usual HTML / CSS / JS). As we (hopefully) all know, brotli is the preferred option (eg. for Google Page Speed / Lighthouse) due to generally having much better compression for these sorts of file types so I looked into adding it to nginx.
Unfortunately the only relevant search result I found was for an old post I'd made myself, however back when Apache was in use and not nginx.
Now I should preface this by saying: for production environments you really should be using something like Azure Frontdoor to do this, however I wanted something that would work in a non-prod environment without Frontdoor.
Fortunately the README for Brotli is nice and easy to follow in explaining how to build it, and there are plenty of articles out there around adding Brotli to nginx.
Just SSH in and run the following script to build 2x *.so files (used in the next script)
#eg. nginx version: nginx/1.26.3 version="$(nginx -v 2>&1 | cut -d '/' -f 2)" #version=1.26.3 #if you'd rather specify a version echo "Found nginx version $version" cd /tmp apt -y install git cmake git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/google/ngx_brotli #git config --global --add safe.directory /tmp/ngx_brotli/deps/brotli cd ngx_brotli/deps/brotli mkdir out && cd out cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS="-Ofast -m64 -march=native -mtune=native -flto -funroll-loops -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections" -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS="-Ofast -m64 -march=native -mtune=native -flto -funroll-loops -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wl,--gc-sections" -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./installed .. cmake --build . --config Release --target brotlienc cd ../../../.. wget https://nginx.org/download/nginx-$version.tar.gz tar -xzvf nginx-$version.tar.gz cd nginx-$version ./configure --with-compat --add-dynamic-module=/tmp/ngx_brotli make modules cp objs/ngx_http_brotli_filter_module.so /home/site/nginx cp objs/ngx_http_brotli_static_module.so /home/site/nginx
Then add the following start.sh file to your app startup
#!/bin/bash echo "Replacing nginx configuration" cp /home/site/nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-available/default echo "Adding brotli module" cp /home/site/nginx/60-mod-brotli.conf /etc/nginx/modules-enabled/ cp /home/site/nginx/ngx_http_brotli_filter_module.so /usr/share/nginx/modules/ cp /home/site/nginx/ngx_http_brotli_static_module.so /usr/share/nginx/modules/ echo "Reloading nginx to apply new configuration" service nginx reload
Finally, ensure your nginx.conf file (which you use to overwrite above) specifies to use the brotli module before gzip
# Compression brotli on; brotli_static on; # brotli_comp_level 4; brotli_types text/plain text/css text/xml text/javascript text/x-component application/xml application/xml+rss application/javascript application/json application/atom+xml application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/x-font-ttf application/x-font-opentype application/x-font-truetype application/x-web-app-manifest+json application/xhtml+xml application/octet-stream font/opentype font/truetype font/eot font/otf image/svg+xml image/x-icon image/vnd.microsoft.icon image/bmp; gzip on; #...etc
