I'm trying to gzip static files in nginx (without compressing the file each time). I'd like to do this for two reasons:

1) The files we're serving are very frequently requested, we'd prefer the CPU savings of not having to compress the files 2) We actually find that we get a good savings by using advdef (a gzip encoder that uses 7zip to increase the compression ratio).

So far, I've found that doing this works:

set $okstring "";

if ($http_accept_encoding ~ "gzip") { set $okstring "$okstring header"; }

if (-f $document_root/$document_uri.gz) { set $okstring "$okstring file"; }

if ($okstring = " header file") { rewrite "^(.*).js$" "$1.js.gz"; }

location ~ .*\.js.gz { types { text/javascript gz; } add_header Content-Encoding gzip; add_header Vary Accept-Encoding; }

However, this isn't the cleanest solution.

I was trying to find a good way to write a module that did this, but couldn't figure out a way to intercept the request when it had been mapped to a physical path. What's the best way to go about writing a module that does this?