sub_filter + proxy_pass requires no gzip encoding

The nginx sub module is useful for injecting html into web requests at the nginx level. It looks like this:

location / {
  sub_filter '</head>' '<script>doSomething();</script></head>';
}

Replace the end closing tag with a script tag and the head closing tag.

This does not work however with the proxy_pass module response coming from the proxy_pass url is gzip encoded.

In this case, you want to specify to the destination server that you will accept no encoding whatoever with the proxy_set_header directive, like so:

  proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";

Altogether it looks like this:

location / {
  proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";
  proxy_pass http://destination.example.com
  sub_filter '</head>' '<script>doSomething();</script></head>';
}

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