How to enable either Gzip or Deflate compression via .htaccess?

Question

How to enable either Gzip or Deflate compression via .htaccess and which one is best these days? Code examples needed.

Answer 1

HTML5 Boilerplate (http://html5boilerplate.com) offers what seems to be the best and most effective solution setting along with plenty of others like caching, mime types etc. Highly recommended.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

# Force compression for mangled headers.
# http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/pushing-beyond-gzipping
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
</IfModule>
</IfModule>


# Compress all output labeled with one of the following MIME-types
# (for Apache versions below 2.3.7, you don't need to enable `mod_filter`
#  and can remove the `<IfModule mod_filter.c>` and `</IfModule>` lines
#  as `AddOutputFilterByType` is still in the core directives).

<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom+xml \
application/javascript \
application/json \
application/rss+xml \
application/vnd.ms-fontobject \
application/x-font-ttf \
application/x-web-app-manifest+json \
application/xhtml+xml \
application/xml \
font/opentype \
image/svg+xml \
image/x-icon \
text/css \
text/html \
text/plain \
text/x-component \
text/xml
</IfModule>

</IfModule>

EDIT: Since this question and answer keep getting upvoted after couple of years I'm putting H5BP server configs link for more complete optimization.

EDIT: fixed link to https://github.com/h5bp/server-configs-apache

Answer 2

See the Apache mod_deflate documentation, specifically, the "compress everything except images" example. It has worked well for me and would be put into an .htaccess file as follows:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
        # Insert filter
        SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

        # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

        # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
        BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

        # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
        # BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

        # NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
        # the above regex won't work. You can use the following
        # workaround to get the desired effect:
        BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

        # Don't compress images
        SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
        \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

        # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
        Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</IfModule>

And, of course, make sure that you have the following in your httpd.conf file to enable mod_deflate:

LoadModule deflate_module libexec/apache2/mod_deflate.so

Answer 3

I enabled deflate on static assets on my site (by MIME type) using the following added to the .htaccess file at the root of my public_html directory:

<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/xml text/css text/plain
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript application/javascript application/x-javascript application/json
</ifModule>

You can also enable it by file extension, though I don't have the syntax for that handy.