Clay Harmon Blog Just another internet ASCII hole

Enabling gzip compression on EC2

May 22nd, 2014 tags: AWS, EC2, server, and sysadmin

I am still tweaking small things on the Amazon EC2 server that is hosting my site. One of the things that I did not do immediately is enable gzip compression of all the site data when it is served to a browser. What this does is compress all the files down before they are pushed across all those tubes that make up the internet, and the browser then decompresses the files on the other side.

Depending on the type of file that is being compressed, this can really reduce the bandwidth needed to display your site. This is a benefit to both the site owner and and the site user.

In the case of the EC2 AMI1 installation that I am using, the apache server loads the mod_deflate module by default, so there is nothing to configure in /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf.

All that is needed is to paste the following recommendations from HTML5 Boilerplate to your .htaccess file that is located at the public root of your site:

# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# | Compression                                                                |
# ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

<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/ld+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>

This will allow your site to consume significantly less bandwidth in many situations. A painless win!

  1. Amazon Machine Image ↩

Other posts in this category