Gzip/Brotli compression in nginx: serving compressed assets

Static assets and API responses are served uncompressed, wasting bandwidth and slowing page loads, especially on mobile connections.

Enable gzip (and optionally brotli) in nginx:

http {
    # Gzip settings
    gzip on;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_proxied any;
    gzip_comp_level 6;  # 1-9, 6 is a good balance
    gzip_min_length 256;
    gzip_types
        text/plain
        text/css
        text/javascript
        application/json
        application/javascript
        application/x-javascript
        image/svg+xml
        font/woff2;

    # Brotli (requires ngx_brotli module)
    # brotli on;
    # brotli_comp_level 6;
    # brotli_types text/plain text/css application/json application/javascript;

    server {
        # Serve pre-compressed files if they exist (.gz or .br)
        gzip_static on;
    }
}

Pre-compress assets at build time for best performance:

find ./dist -type f \( -name '*.js' -o -name '*.css' \) \
    -exec gzip -9 -k {} \;

On-the-fly compression adds CPU overhead. Pre-compressing assets during builds serves the best compression with zero runtime cost.