Compression in Apache 2.0

By Joshua Erdman
Digital Foundation, inc.

This is my favorite part, setting up compression. We will need to edit the web server configuration file which is: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

You will definitely need to get used to editing this file. It contains almost all the configuration for the Apache webserver and is used for setting up compression, PHP, hosting multiple websites, etc.
Open the config file by: pico /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

The module used to compress the outgoing HTML is called Deflate. This module only works well with static pages. If you are planning on using PHP code you shouldn't use compression. Output tends to get lost in the output buffer when the flush(); command is used.

Now that you have the config file opened, go to the LoadModule section, if you have a clue you will know you are there because it will have a bunch of lines that start with LoadModule.
Add this line:

LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so

Now we must set up the parameters for the webserver to use the defalte module.
So search for the string: AddOutputFilter

You can do this by pressing CTRL-W in pico and then type in whatever text it is that you are searching for in this case it is AddOutputfilter.
Now add this line:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Finally search for the proxy server directives and add these lines right before them:

<Location />
# 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

# 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

</Location>
Clue: the ‘#’ sign is a common way to make a note in a config file/pbr>

Article last reviewed: 05/02/2003

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Created by: Digital Foundation, inc.

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