nginx.conf

# Set another default user than root for security reasons
user       www www;

# As a thumb rule: One per CPU. If you are serving a large amount
# of static files, which requires blocking disk reads, you may want
# to increase this from the number of cpu_cores available on your
# system.
#
# The maximum number of connections for Nginx is calculated by:
# max_clients = worker_processes * worker_connections
worker_processes 1;

# Maximum file descriptors that can be opened per process
# This should be > worker_connections
worker_rlimit_nofile 8192;

events {
  # When you need > 8000 * cpu_cores connections, you start optimizing
  # your OS, and this is probably the point at where you hire people
  # who are smarter than you, this is *a lot* of requests.
  worker_connections  8000;
}

# Change these paths to somewhere that suits you!
error_log  logs/error.log;
pid        logs/nginx.pid;

http {
  # Set the mime-types via the mime.types external file
  include       nginx-mime.types;

  # And the fallback mime-type
  default_type  application/octet-stream;

  # Format for our log files
  log_format   main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local]  $status '
    '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
    '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"';

  # Click tracking!
  access_log   logs/access.log  main;

  # ~2 seconds is often enough for HTML/CSS, but connections in
  # Nginx are cheap, so generally it's safe to increase it
  keepalive_timeout 20;

  # You usually want to serve static files with Nginx
  sendfile on;

  tcp_nopush on; # off may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff
  tcp_nodelay off; # on may be better for Comet/long-poll stuff

  # Enable Gzip:
  gzip on;
  gzip_http_version 1.0;
  gzip_comp_level 5;
  gzip_min_length 512;
  gzip_buffers 4 8k;
  gzip_proxied any;
  gzip_types
    # text/html is always compressed by HttpGzipModule
    text/css
    text/javascript
    text/xml
    text/plain
    text/x-component
    application/javascript
    application/json
    application/xml
    application/rss+xml
    font/truetype
    font/opentype
    application/vnd.ms-fontobject
    image/svg+xml;

  # This should be turned on if you are going to have pre-compressed copies (.gz) of
  # static files available. If not it should be left off as it will cause extra I/O
  # for the check. It would be better to enable this in a location {} block for
  # a specific directory:
  # gzip_static on;

  gzip_disable        "MSIE [1-6]\.";
  gzip_vary           on;

  server {
    # listen 80 default_server deferred; # for Linux
    # listen 80 default_server accept_filter=httpready; # for FreeBSD
    listen 80 default_server;

    # e.g. "localhost" to accept all connections, or "www.example.com"
    # to handle the requests for "example.com" (and www.example.com)
    # server_name www.example.com;

    # Path for static files
    root /sites/example.com/public;

    # Custom 404 page
    error_page 404 /404.html;

    # This is pretty long expiry and assume your using
    # cachebusting with query params like
    #   <script src="application.js?20110529">
    #
    # Just be careful if your using this on a frequently
    # updated static site. You may want to crank this back
    # to 5m which is 5 minutes.
    expires 1M; # yes one month

    # Static assets
    location ~* ^.+\.(manifest|appcache)$ {
      expires -1;
      access_log logs/static.log;
    }

    # Set expires max on static file types (make sure you are using cache busting filenames or query params):
    location ~* ^.+\.(css|js|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|gz|svg|svgz|ttf|otf|woff|eot|mp4|ogg|ogv|webm)$ {
      expires max;
      access_log off;
    }

    # opt-in to the future
    add_header "X-UA-Compatible" "IE=Edge,chrome=1";

  }
}