Getting Rid of /.well-known/traffic-advice 404 errors in nginx web server

It seems Google have implemented private prefetch proxy in Chrome for Android.

The upside of this private prefetch proxy is improved browsing experience for mobile users by reducing waiting time for web pages to load.

The downside is, as web server administrators – you might find a lot of 404 status in your web logs.

To solve this, you could either :

  • Write directive to ignore 404 logs for “traffic-advice”
  • Create “/.well-known/traffic-advice file for each domain and set the file to be served with “application/trafficadvice+json” MIME type [source]

Solution

Luckily, TechTitBits have come up with a convenient solution which only involves adding a few lines in configuration files to enable Chrome for Android prefetched proxy in nginx.

location = /.well-known/traffic-advice {
    types { }
    default_type "application/trafficadvice+json; charset=utf-8";
    return 200 '[{ "user_agent": "prefetch-proxy", "fraction": 1 }]';
}

With this solution, you would only need to add the location block within the server { } context in the site configurations.

Thank you for the tip: Traffic Advice configuration for Nginx

Configuration to run OJS 3 smoothly behind nginx reverse proxy

A lot of people struggling in configuring PKP Open Journal System 3 (OJS3) to run behind nginx reverse proxy as OJS3 does not support nginx natively

So most implementation would settle with Apache HTTPD server or install it behind nginx reverse proxy.

However the problem is that the OJS3 behave badly when placed behind nginx reverse proxy, especially when the reverse proxy is using HTTPS / TLS. This messed up the based URL in the OJS3, subsequently causing some resources from the website to be unavailable.

To solve this, you only need to add a single line in the Apache HTTPD site configuration file.

        SetEnvIf X-Forwarded-Proto "https" HTTPS=on

A full blown example is included via gist

No time to read lengthy articles? TLDR Chrome extension will digest that for you

Ever encountered long winded article which makes you feel like you do not want to read?

Enter TLDR; Chrome extension, a browser extension made by Recognant which can summarize any article for you.  The extension works well with English language article, but upon my inspection, it can also works well for Malay language article.

A must have extension  for those who just want to browse through articles at a glance.

Share files quickly using python3

You can enable quick file sharing using python3 by activating its built-in internal webserver

 


python3 -m http.server

The default webserver will listen to port 8000, you can change to any port above 1024 without root privileges by specifying the port number after the command:


python3 -m http.server 9090

Check if your web server supports Brotli Compression

Brotli is a new compressed data format developed by Google for compressing web data. It is documented in RFC7932. Currently, almost all modern web browser support Brotli which compressed better and faster than Deflate.

Brotli is can be enabled in most popular web server including:

  • Apache HTTPD – through mod_brotli (for release after 2.4.26)
  • Nginx – ngx_brotli (provided by Google)
  • Node.js (trough shrink-ray module
  • LightSpeed (since version 5.2)
  • Microsoft IIS (through IIS-brotli extension, for IIS 7.5 and above)

Testing for Brotli Support

KeyCDN.com has provided a tool for testing whether your website supports Brotli compression.

You can go over the website and get your server tested. For nginx webserver, ngx_brotli will automatically downgrade to gzip if the browser does not support brotli encoding