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This is a module that is distributed with Tengine which is a distribution of NGINX that is used by the e-commerce/auction site Taobao.com. This distribution contains some modules that are new on the NGINX scene. The ngx_http_concat module is one of them.
The module is inspired by Apache’s modconcat. It follows the same pattern for enabling the concatenation. It uses two ?, like this:
http://example.com/??style1.css,style2.css,foo/style3.css
If a third ? is present it’s treated as version string. Like this:
http://example.com/??style1.css,style2.css,foo/style3.css?v=102234
Configuration example:
location /static/css/ {
concat on;
concat_max_files 20;
}
location /static/js/ {
concat on;
concat_max_files 30;
}
The original description was written by António P. P. Almeida
Syntax: | concat [on|off] |
---|---|
Default: | off |
Context: | http, server, location |
It enables the concatenation in a given context.
Syntax: | concat_types MIME types |
---|---|
Default: | text/css application/x-javascript |
Context: | http, server, location |
Defines the MIME types which can be concatenated in a given context.
Syntax: | concat_unique [on|off] |
---|---|
Default: | on |
Context: | http, server, location |
Defines if only files of a given MIME type can concatenated or if
several MIME types can be concatenated. For example if set to off
then in a given context you can concatenate Javascript and CSS files.
Note that the default value is on
, meaning that only files with same
MIME type are concatenated in a given context. So if you have CSS and
JS you cannot do something like this:
http://example.com/static/??foo.css,bar/foobaz.js
In order to do that you must set concat_unique off
. This applies
to any other type of files that you decide to concatenate by adding
the respective MIME type via concat_types
,
Syntax: | concat_max_files number |
---|---|
Default: | 10 |
Context: | http, server, location |
Defines the maximum number of files that can be concatenated in a given context. Note that a given URI cannot be bigger than the page size of your platform. On Linux you can get the page size issuing:
getconf PAGESIZE
Usually is 4k. So if you try to concatenate a lot of files together in a given context you might hit this barrier. To overcome that OS defined limitation you must use the large_client_header_buffers directive. Set it to the value you need.
Syntax: | concat_delimiter string |
---|---|
Default: | none |
Context: | http, server, locatione |
Defines the delimiter between two files.
If the config is concat_delimiter "\n"
,a "\n"
would be inserted betwen 1.js and 2.js when visting http://example.com/??1.js,2.js
Syntax: | concat_ignore_file_error [on|off] |
---|---|
Default: | off |
Context: | http, server, location |
Whether to ignore 404 and 403 or not.
Clone the git repo.
git clone git://github.com/taobao/nginx-http-concat.git
Add the module to the build configuration by adding:
--add-module=/path/to/nginx-http-concat
Build the NGINX binary.
Install the NGINX binary.
Configure contexts where concat is enabled.
Build your links such that the above format, i.e., all URIs that have files that are to be concatenated have a ?? prefix. The HTML produced would have something like this inside the <head> element for concatenating CSS files.
<link rel="stylesheet" href="??foo1.css,foo2.css,subdir/foo3.css?v=2345" />
Similarly for JavaScript files you should have:
<script src="??bar1.js,bar22.css,subdir/bar3.js?v=3245" />
Now if you open up the network tab on firebug or on safari/chrome/chromium browser inspector you should see a single bar where before here were many. Congratulations you’re now using file concatenation at the server level. No longer messing around with scripts for aggregating files. Note although that there’s no minification of files. So you might want to minify the files before concatenating them.
Done.
Thanks to Joshua Zhu and the Taobao platform engineering team for releasing Tengine. Also for being kind enough to clarify things regarding this module on the NGINX mailing list.
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