Learn Gzip Compression On Apache And Nginx

December 15, 2019

Introduction

Compressing content before sending it over the wire not only saves bandwidth, it makes web applications faster. The combined time it takes for a web server to compress data and a browser to decompress it, is less than sending just uncompressed data through the wire. This writeup shows you how to configure both Apache and Nginx with gzip compression.

Apache

Add below snippet to your apache2.conf or .htaccess file.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    # compress html, css, javascript, text, xml and fonts
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
    # you can also compress by file type/extension:
    <files *.html>
        SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
    </files>
</IfModule>

Nginx

Gzip should already be enabled on Nginx by default. If not, open its configuration file (sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf) and make sure that the settings under the gzip section are uncommented (like in snippet below).

##
# Gzip Settings
##
gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_buffers 16 8k;
gzip_http_version 1.1;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;

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