Configuring Nginx for High‑Performance Static Sites: Caching, Gzip, CORS, and Anti‑Hotlinking

Overview: The article summarizes practical issues encountered when configuring Nginx for a high‑performance static website, covering caching, gzip compression, cross‑origin resource sharing (CORS), and hotlink protection.

Cache: By setting appropriate Expires and Cache-Control headers (e.g., expires 30d or max-age=time ), browsers can reuse resources, reducing latency and improving user experience.

location ~* \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ {
    expires 30d;
}
#expires 30s;   # cache 30 seconds
#expires 30m;   # cache 30 minutes
#expires 2h;    # cache 2 hours
#expires 30d;   # cache 30 days

Principle analysis: The request‑response flow is described step‑by‑step, showing how the browser first fetches a resource, how the server returns caching headers, how the browser validates cached content using ETag and Last-Modified , and how a 304 response is used when the resource is unchanged.

Cache‑control rules: The article explains that Cache-Control has higher priority than Expires and provides example configurations for static assets such as CSS and JavaScript.

location ~* \.(css|js)$ {
    expires 7d;
    add_header Cache-Control "public";
}

location ~* \.(css|js)$ {
    expires 600;
    add_header Cache-control max-age=800;
}

Gzip module: Enabling gzip reduces the amount of data transferred; the article shows how to turn it on, set the HTTP version, compression level, and the MIME types to compress.

location ~ .*\.(jpg|gif|png|js)$ {
    gzip on;
    gzip_http_version 1.1;
    gzip_comp_level 2; # compression level, default 1, max 9
    gzip_types text/plain application/javascript application/x-javascript text/css application/xml text/javascript application/x-httpd-php image/jpeg image/gif img/png;
}

CORS and anti‑hotlinking: The article provides Nginx directives to allow specific origins, methods, and headers, handle OPTIONS pre‑flight requests, and block hotlinking by checking the Referer header.

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name www.stark.com;
    location / {
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' 'http://stark1.com https://stark2.com';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'User-Agent,Keep-Alive,Content-Type';
        add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
        if ($request_method = 'OPTIONS') {
            add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' '*';
            add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS';
            add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'User-Agent,Keep-Alive,Content-Type';
            add_header 'Access-Control-Max-Age' 1728000;
            add_header 'Content-Type' 'text/plain charset=UTF-8';
            add_header 'Content-Length' 0;
            return 204;
        }
    }
}

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name yourdomain.com;
    location / {
        root /path/to/your/files;
        valid_referers none blocked server_names *.yourdomain.com;
        if ($invalid_referer) {
            return 403;
        }
    }
}