Is html or php header needed for gzip?

Question

I use gzip module of nginx to compress documents. When gzip is enabled nginx will automatically send content-ending of gzip with HTTP headers, right?

Without adding any PHP header header() or HTML meta http-equiv, this works perfectly. However, I have seen on online tutorial for adding header for gzip whether by PHP or HTML meta to assist browser to process gzipped data.

Is it really needed? Since I was not sure if this is needed on some conduction (that I am not testing), I asked this question for further clarification of the issue.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 26 '12 at 07:54

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Nginx compresses data on mime type. For static files it uses the mime.types file for this but for data from a backend you do need to set the mime type unless the default is already text/html or you've added the default to the types of be compressed. See http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpGzipModule#gzip_types

answered Mar 26 '12 at 07:54

Martin Fjordvald

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Yes, it compress text/html (by default), and without HTML or PHP header it successfully send gzip header. My question is whether I need to add gzip meta or header too? or nginx does this automatically? – Googlebot Mar 26 '12 at 08:03
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Nginx will automatically add the gzip header. – Martin Fjordvald Mar 27 '12 at 06:37
Then adding PHP header is useless, right? – Googlebot Mar 27 '12 at 06:38
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If nginx is compressing it then it will make sure the response is properly formatted. You don't need to do anything at all on PHP side. – Martin Fjordvald Mar 27 '12 at 08:09

Is html or php header needed for gzip?

1 Answers1