Setting up a website on VPS is always fun.

I selected DigitalOcean for BestFlare, and while uploading the WordPress theme, I got request entity too large error.

Are you in the same situation?

Error, which I got:

nginx-413-request-entity-too-large

Let’s find out how large was requested entity.

  • Login to Nginx server
  • Go to the error file log location. The default location is:
/var/log/nginx/error.log
  • View the file and look for the error, you should see something like “client intended to send too large body.” This is what I was receiving in logs.
2015/06/12 23:10:47 [error] 1489#0: *10 client intended to send too large body: 8338355 bytes, client: 115.66.213.149, server: bestflare.com, request: "POST /bestflare/wp-admin/update.php?action=upload-theme HTTP/1.1", host: "bestflare.com", referrer: https://bestflare.com/bestflare/wp-admin/theme-install.php?upload

By default, Nginx is configured with 2 MB to accept the body size, and as you can see in a request, it was around 8.5 MB hence the above error.

Fix request entity too large error

Add the following parameter in nginx.conf file. A default installation location is /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

client_max_body_size 10M;

I have added 10MB. Of course, you can adjust this based on the requirement.

To get this reflected, you need to restart the Nginx. Now you should be able to upload the WordPress themes.