# Display any file in a browser as plain text

Here’s how to add `Content-Type: text/plain` with NGINX to all files inside a
given directory.

The matching rules come from the same
[NGINX `location` directive](/understunding-ngix-location-directive-and-redirects)
used for redirects.

If you don’t want to download or execute a file, but only view it as raw text in
the browser, as with `.txt` files, you can tell the web server to render it as
plain text by setting the content type in the headers:

```
Content-Type text/plain
```

## Edit headers with NGINX

With NGINX you can do it like this:

```nginx
location test.php {
  add_header Content-Type text/plain;
}
```

That goes into your NGINX server block file. It only targets a single file. You
can add a regex to target all files in a specific directory, for instance:

```nginx
# Target code dir
location /code/ {
  # All files in it
  location ~* {
    add_header Content-Type text/plain;
  }
}
```