NGINX

Configure manifest.webmanifest mime type

You need to register the correct MIME type for the web manifest by adding it either to the default file at /etc/nginx/mime.types

# /etc/nginx/mime.types
types {
  # Manifest files
  application/manifest+json  webmanifest;
  ... 
}

or any http, server or location location block with

types {
  application/manifest+json  webmanifest;
}

You can validate the setting by checking the HTTP headers once the app is deployed

curl -s -I -X GET https://yourserver/manifest.webmanifest | grep content-type -i

and check that the result is content-type: application/manifest+json.

Basic configuration with http to https redirection

Update your server.conf configuration file with:

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name yourdomain.com www.yourdomain.com;
  return 301 https://yourdomain.com$request_uri;
}

Cache-Control

Ensure you have a very restrictive setup for your Cache-Control headers in place.

Double check that you do not have caching features enabled, especially immutable, on locations like:

• /
• /sw.js
• /index.html
• /manifest.webmanifest

NGINX will add E-Tag-headers itself, so there is not much to in that regard.

As a general rule, files in /assets/ can have a very long cache time, as everything in there should contain a hash in the filename.

An example configuration inside your server block could be:

# all assets contain hash in filename, cache forever
location ^~ /assets/ {
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, s-maxage=31536000, immutable";
    ...
    try_files $uri =404;
}

# all workbox scripts are compiled with hash in filename, cache forever3
location ^~ /workbox- {
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, s-maxage=31536000, immutable";
    ...
    try_files $uri =404;
}

# assume that everything else is handled by the application router, by injecting the index.html.
location / {
    autoindex off;
    expires off;
    add_header Cache-Control "public, max-age=0, s-maxage=0, must-revalidate" always;
    ...
    try_files $uri /index.html =404;
}

Be aware that this is a very simplistic approach and you must test every change, as the NGINX match precedences for locations are not very intuitive and error prone if you do not know the exact rules.

DANGER

Always re-test and re-assure that the caching for mission critical files is as low as possible if not hashed files or you might invalidate clients for a long time.