Setting up Nginx to serve a static site

Since I am hosting this blog in a very small linux box using Nginx as a web server I want to write the basic configuration so I have a reference to come back in the feature if I need to set this up again. Here is a guide to install Nginx. In a Debian-like linux OS Nginx sites configurations are loaded from the sites-enabled directory but as a best practice I alway create the config file in the sites-available and create a symlink.

This is the most basic configuration to server the site and have a custom 404 page:

server {
  root /path/to/your/static/content;
  index index.html;
  server_name example.com www.example.com;

  error_page 404 /404;

  location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ $uri.html =404;
  }
}

Since I want to optimize the configuration to cache some files like .css and .js I'll add some directives.

location ~* .(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$ {
    expires 1d;
}

Since this is a static site, I'm pretty sure I won't have backend errors... well there is no backend code so, Im just going to log critical errors just for the lols.

error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log crit;

Also I'm using Analytics so I don't really care about the access logs, besides I don't want to use HD space with something I won't be using.

access_log off;

And finally I want to gzip the content so:

gzip on;
gzip_min_length 10240;
gzip_comp_level 1;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_disable msie6;
gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
gzip_types
    text/css
    text/javascript
    text/xml
    text/plain
    text/x-component
    application/javascript
    application/x-javascript
    application/json
    application/xml
    application/rss+xml
    application/atom+xml
    font/truetype
    font/opentype
    application/vnd.ms-fontobject
    image/svg+xml;

And some useful links for reference: