How to disable ETag in NGINX? Read the article to find out. At Bobcares, with our Server Management Service, we can handle your issues.

How to disable ETag in NGINX?

The “Entity Tag,” or ETag, is an essential part of the web caching algorithms employed by NGINX and other web servers. It is a special label given to a particular version of a web server resource, like a file or a webpage. By comparing ETag values, ETags enables the server and client to efficiently manage the caching and retrieval of web resources.

NGINX web servers only create ETag for static files by default. We must change the “etag” directive in the configuration file to “off” in order to turn off ETag for static files. The steps are as follows:

1. We can use any text editor to access the NGINX main configuration file.

2. Look in the configuration file for the http block. Find the server block inside the http block. We must update each server block separately if we have several server blocks.

3. To disable ETag, we must add the following line to the server block:

The code will appear to be:

4. Save the modifications and then exit the file afterward.

5. Run the following command to verify that the configuration file syntax is correct:

If the syntax is accurate, we see something like this:

6. Reload the NGINX settings for the modifications to take effect if the syntax check is successful:

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Conclusion

We can improve performance by disabling ETag in NGINX, especially in settings that make use of a reverse proxy or CDN.