recommended nginx configuration for meteor

Although I'm not an nginx expert, I feel like I have a much better understanding of how to do this now. As I figure out more I'll update this answer.

One possible solution to my original question is this:

location ~* "^/[a-z0-9]{40}\.(css|js)$" {
  root /home/ubuntu/app/bundle/programs/web.browser;
  access_log off;
  expires max;
}

Which says: Any URL for this site containing a slash followed by 40 alphanumeric characters + .js or .css, can be found in the web.browser directory. Serve these files statically, don't write them to the access log, and tell the client that they can be cached forever.

Because the the main css and js files are uniquely named after each bundle operation, this should be safe to do.

I'll maintain a full version of this example here. It's also worth noting that I'm using a recent build of nginx which supports WebSockets as talked about here.

Finally, don't forget to fully enable gzip in your nginx config. My gzip section looks like:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

After doing all that, I was able to get a decent score on pagespeed.

update 9/17/2014:

Updated the paths for meteor 0.9.2.1

I made some updates and improvements to the other answer. Specifically,

• the X-Forwarded-For header needs to be set for Meteor's new IP address detection that is done in this file. It does not appear that X-Real-IP is used.
• the /nginx_status path can be used to monitor the amount of traffic coming through the proxy.

I've fiddled with this a bit and come up with the following configuration. Edit your fields appropriately.

First, compression, which speeds up load time considerably. Note that the gzip_buffers directive is usually automatically computed by default using the system's memory page size:

gzip on;                                                                                                                                                  
gzip_disable "msie6";                                                                                                                                     
gzip_min_length 1100;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

The server config itself:

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name my.domain.com;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/nginx/certificate.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/nginx/certificate.key;

    access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.ssl_access_log main;
    error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.ssl_error_log info;

    # Forward to meteor server                                                                                                                        
    location / {
         proxy_pass http://localhost:3000;
         proxy_http_version 1.1;
         proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
         proxy_set_header Connection "upgrade";
         proxy_set_header Host $host;
         proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
         proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    }

    # copied from http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/04/29/monitoring-nginx-with-rrdtool/
    location /nginx_status {
         stub_status on;
         access_log off;
         allow 192.168.0.0/24;
         deny all;
    }
}

Finally, as Dan mentioned, you will need to set the HTTP_FORWARDED_COUNT environment variable in Meteor to properly pick up the client IPs from behind the reverse proxy.