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
location /static/css/ {
concat on;
concat_max_files 20;
}
location /static/js/ {
concat on;
concat_max_files 30;
}
concat on | off
default: concat off
context: http, server, location
It enables the concatenation in a given context.
concat_types MIME types
default: concat_types: text/css application/x-javascript
context: http, server, location
Defines the MIME types which can be concatenated in a given context.
concat_unique on | off
default: concat_unique 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,
concat_max_files numberp
default: concat_max_files 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.
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 visted http://example.com/??1.js,2.js
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/alibaba/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 there 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.
Perusio is maintaing a tagged release at http://github.com/alibaba/nginx-http-concat in synch with the Tengine releases. Refer there for the latest uncommitted tags.
-
footer filter: allows to add some extra data (markup or not) at the end of a request body. It's pratical for things like adding time stamps or other miscellaneous stuff without having to tweak your application.
-
http slice: allows to serve a file by slices. A sort of reverse byte-range. Useful for serving large files while not hogging the network.
-
As referred at the outset this module is part of the
tengineNginx distribution. So you might want to save yourself some work and just build it from scratch usingtenginein lieu if the official Nginx source. -
If you fancy a bleeding edge Nginx package (from the dev releases) for Debian made to measure then you might be interested in Perusio's HA/HP debian Nginx package with built-in support for nginx-http-concat. Instructions for using the repository and making the package live happily inside a stable distribution installation are provided.
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.
Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Alibaba Group Holding Limited
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-
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-
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