Comments on: Compress JavaScript and CSS without touching your application code

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 21:15:44 +0000

I recently wrote a mod_perl output filter which sits inside Apache. It intercepts requests for .css files and then “compresses” them on the fly before sending. It’s not gzip compression, what it does is strip whitespace, comments, newlines etc. Check it out here: https://secure.grepular.com/blog/index.php/2009/10/28/compressing-css-on-the-fly/

By: faraz

faraz — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:46:38 +0000

i’m using this code so if the gzip version of the file dosen’t exist apache does it on the fly.
———————————–

AddType “text/html” .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

AddType “text/javascript” .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

AddType “text/css” .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

RewriteEngine on
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [QSA,L]

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
—————————–

how can i exclude these:
Netscape 4.06-4.08
IE6
chrome 2.0

like safari?
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari

By: Moonstar

Moonstar — Mon, 25 May 2009 03:02:17 +0000

Google Chrome 1.0 supports this function.

Newly released Google Chrome 2.0 does NOT support this function.

You should exclude Google Chrome 2.0 as well as Safari.

By: sjsweng1

sjsweng1 — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:07:04 +0000

Hi Guys,

This script works great first of all, since I’ve been able to pack down jscript to only 62KB. Where this breaks is if you have image references within the javascript, so URLs like “/images/logo.png” don’t come across.

Is there anything that needs to be done for enabling the images?

Thanks,

Sjs

By: ev45ive

ev45ive — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 19:44:57 +0000

some servers have problem with this solution as mentioned here for example:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=503069

some servers treat rewriten path as absolute and looks for out .js.gz file in system dirs.. to fix that just add “/”

Complete (Fixed) Working Solution for JS/CSS gzipped files:

RewriteEngine On
AddType “text/javascript” .gz
AddType “text/css” .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.(js|css)$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1.gz [QSA,L]

By: Phil

Phil — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:47:33 +0000

awesome stuff! Got it working in our ec2onrails setup in half an hour and it dropped load times for our js 50%

By: nghianghesi

nghianghesi — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:48:01 +0000

i mean for second part of dreamwind

By: nghianghesi

nghianghesi — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:45:05 +0000

note for newbies like me:) mode_headers has to be enabled (this line LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so in apache conf) for

ForceType text/javascript
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip

ForceType text/css
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip

great it work

By: Caching and compression for Apache and mod_rails - DarrenRush.com

Caching and compression for Apache and mod_rails - DarrenRush.com — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 21:16:05 +0000

[...] section below enhances the configuration suggested by The If Works [...]

By: sandeep

sandeep — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 19:33:05 +0000

hey,

I am using Rails. I copied these rules:

AddEncoding gzip .gz
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !Safari
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.gz [QSA,L]

at the end of htaccess file. And I restarted httpd. I have a gipped version of prototype.js.gz in public/javascripts/ as well.

But I am not seeing compression happening although normal html file is getting compressed.

Am i missing something here?

By: Chris Latko

Chris Latko — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:37:40 +0000

Maybe this will save some others time. If you go with dreamwind’s method, make sure you have mod_headers enabled in apache. I had to recompile with the ‘–enable-headers’ to get it to work.

Great article. Solved my problem perfectly.

By: dreamwind

dreamwind — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:11:13 +0000

I think it’s legacy bug of the KHTML engine becase Konqueror also has such troubles (and it should be added to RewriteRule User Agent Condition)

By: Cecil Ward

Cecil Ward — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:33:02 +0000

James, what’s the problem with Safari’s gzip handling? Do you have any more details?

By: dreamwind

dreamwind — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:25:09 +0000

second part

ForceType text/javascript
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip

ForceType text/css
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip

By: dreamwind

dreamwind — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 22:24:23 +0000

For some reasons I’ve failed to correctly setup -f rule (may be due to all the other RewriteRules, don’t know). So my solution is the following. First part redirects to normal files if browser doesn’t support gzip or is Safari, second part delivers correct gzip content to browser. So I also have two versions of the file: gzipped and normal, on page always gzipped version is called. Also I may change the “version” of the file (foo.js?v3.54), all works correctly.

AddEncoding gzip .gz
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} !gzip
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.gz(\?.+)?$ $1 [QSA,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Safari
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.gz(\?.+)?$ $1 [QSA,L]

AddType text/javascript .js
AddType text/css .css

ForceType text/javascript
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip

ForceType text/css
Header set Content-Encoding: gzip