Fix Nginx 'client intended to send too large body' error

If you have an Nginx server set up to handle file uploads, and a user tries to upload a file that is larger than the configured client_max_body_size directive. When this happens, Nginx logs an error message that looks something like this:

[error] 1234#0: *56789 client intended to send too large body: 123456789 bytes

Let’s resolve it.

Prerequisites

• nginx
• sudo privileges

Solution

• According to the log mentioned above, the client sent a request with a body size of 123MB, where it’s likely that nginx client_max_body_size directive has a lower value. To resolve this, we need to increase the value of client_max_body_size to be greater than 123MB.

• You can adjust the value of the client_max_body_size directive in your Nginx configuration to allow for larger request bodies to be accepted. For example, you can increase the value to 200MB:

  server {
    listen       80;
    server_name  example.com;
  
    # Set the maximum allowed size of the client request body to 200M
    client_max_body_size 200M;
  
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://upstream_server;
    }
  }
  

• Remember to reload the Nginx configuration for the changes to take effect:

  sudo systemctl reload nginx
  

Conclusion

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