Solving reverse proxy error ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED

Configuring a reverse proxy is not an easy task. It involves some trial and error and dealing with unexpected errors. One of those errors is ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED. The web site won’t load in your browser and Chrome will show this error message:

Error ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED may show up in your browser when a resource is configured on your reverse proxy, and the backend communication is working. That is: the backend is returning data, but not in a form the browser expects. Like: browser expects a GZIP response, but receives plain text. Therefore the hint content decoding failed. Content received, but the browser is not able to decode / understand the data.

To solve this error, reset the Accept-Encoding request header in your Reverse Proxy configuration.

Apache

RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_headers.html 

Example Apache configuration section for a location named test.

<Location /test>
  RequestHeader unset Accept-Encoding
  ProxyPass https://0.0.0.0:443
  ProxyPassReverse https://0.0.0.0:443/
  Order allow,deny
  Allow from all
</Location>

NGINX

proxy_set_header Accept-Encoding "";

http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_set_header