Nginx Content-Length Header for Static Files with Gzip – How to Force

Addition to Martin Fjordvalds answer:

Apache uses chunked encoding only if the compressed file size is larger than the DeflateBufferSize. Increasing this buffer size will therefore prevent the server using chunked encoding also for larger files, causing the Content-Length to be sent even for zipped data.

More Information is available here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_deflate.html#deflatebuffersize

I'm assuming your media files are in /home/boudewijn/www/bbt/brouwers/media. In which case the following should work.

If you still get a 404 error then check your error log as it should show you the exact file path it's trying to access.

server {

    listen 80;
    server_name mydomain.com;

    access_log /home/boudewijn/www/bbt/brouwers/logs/access.log;
    error_log /home/boudewijn/www/bbt/brouwers/logs/error.log warn;

    root    /home/boudewijn/www/bbt/brouwers/;

    try_files $uri @proxy;

    location @proxy {
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            include /etc/nginx/proxy.conf;
    }
}