Force nginx to send specific Content-Type

Question

How to overwrite default Content-Type in nginx? Currently when I request 01.dae file, there's

Content-Type: application/octet-stream;

And I want it to be

Content-Type: application/xml;

I tried something like

location ~* \.dae$ {
  types { };
  default_type application/xml;
}

and

location ~* \.dae$ {
  add_header Content-Type application/xml;
}

but nothing works.

Answer 1

You can edit /etc/nginx/mime.types and add it

types {
    application/xml        dae;
}

I haven't found the the exact string application/xml in my mime.types so I suppose you can directly include it inside your server block, in the server scope or something.

If you do not have access to the system mime.types then you can set it in the location block if you have access to that. https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#types

WARNING When you set types it will overwrite all mime types set in /etc/nginx/mime.types. To avoid this target specific extensions with a Regular expression location block. Also know that locations can be nested, like so:

server {
    # ...

    location / {
        root   /usr/share/nginx/html;
        index  index.html;

        location ~* \.mjs$ {# target only *.mjs files
            # now we can safely override types since we are only
            # targeting a single file extension.
            types {
                text/javascript mjs;
            }
        }
    }
}