Nginx: Error 413 – Request Entity Too Large

I have installed Nginx on one of my servers. The target was to run a blog there. After everything was set up, the blog was running, but I faced a problem while uploading a file.

The server was returning an Nginx error – 413 – Request Entity Too Large.

So this is an error message returned by Nginx, and it was related to file size. The file that I was trying to upload was surely bigger than the allowed size.

The fix is simple – we have to allow large file sizes in our Nginx configuration.

So, fix this issue. Open file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf in your preferred editor(maybe vim, or a maybe more simple one like nano).

Make sure you are logged in as root, as you will need permission to edit the conf and restart the Nginx server.

sudo vim /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

And the configuration that we are looking for is client_max_body_size. If that is not already present, then add that line.

client_max_body_size 20M;

In the place of 20M, you can put a bigger number if you prefer that.

Then restart your Nginx server. I did the following for my server:

sudo service nginx reload

Or you can restart the server by using:

sudo service nginx restart

That’s all for Nginx conf.

But there are other things that you also need to consider. Like, I am using PHP for my blog, so there are also some file/request size limitations in PHP configuration. If you are also using PHP, then consider changing the following configuration:

# For maximum allowed file size for upload
upload_max_filesize = 20M

# For maximum allowed size for request/body of the request
post_max_size = 30M

# Change memory limit if needed
memory_limit = 32M

If you are using PHP-FPM, then you need to restart that by one of the following commands:

sudo systemctl restart php-fpm

# or use this command
sudo systemctl restart php7.2-fpm.service

# or use this
sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/php-fpm restart

If you are still facing a problem, check the directory’s permission where you are trying to upload the file. If you are using any other programming language, then also check their allowed permission.