HTTP:accept-encoding gzip - how to?

[chuee]

Hi,
I want to serve gzip static html files, but the default seems to ignore them (i get a directory access forbidden), so I tried .htaccess rules:

#Check to see if browser can accept gzip files.
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} (gzip)

#make sure there's no trailing .gz on the url
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$

#check to see if a .gz version of the file exists.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f

#All conditions met so add .gz to URL filename (invisibly)
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [L]

I get the same Forbidden message when using a URL pointing to a directory (i.e looking for an index.html, but only index.html.gz is there); if i specify the file, index.html - then the file is downloaded by the browser.

The code above works on another linux server i use, and I am baffled at the moment. Any suggestions regarding the DirectAdmin set up wrt to gzip file handling, would be received with delight. I am not intending to have dynamic compression; these are static files.

 

[massive]

Did you check the apache logs?

 

[Webcart]

Assuming your DA server has been installed with custombuild, your Apache should include DEFLATE and GZIP modules, so you don't have to create .gz version of files: your index.html file (or any other .html file for that matter) should be served compressed automatically. Give it a try.

Forbidden message has nothing to do with that by the way.
If I guess your server configuration correctly the following addition to .htaccess file will fix it:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.shtml index.php index.php4 index.php3 index.phtml index.cgi index.html.gz

As a side note, may I point out that your rewrite rules do not capture home page URL (http://www.example.com/) and have no effect in this particular case.

 

[chuee]

Hey thanks! To a knowledgeable and alert person. Yes you are right about the capture of home page (index.XXX), and I had wondered if there was a better way. I shall search for a solution.
I have initially tried your suggestion, and i saw nothing delightful in the response headers, or initial browser test. I shall try a few variations of my htaccess. I do recall checking the server modules, and saw no DEFLATE and GZIP modules, so i assumed they weren't using a custom build.

I tried the tool at http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/check_http_gzip.php
which 'checks if a specific web page sends out the correct headers needed to transmit compressed content to the browser', and reported: The 'http server hasn't sent out a "Content-Encoding" header'.

 

[Webcart]

Yes you are right about the capture of home page (index.XXX), and I had wondered if there was a better way. I shall search for a solution.

I might be able to help with the correct mod_rewrite rules if you provide more info about your server setup, but I would suggest using it as a last resort. Some browsers have broken implementation of gzip and therefore you can't rely entirely on accept-encoding. Contrary to your custom made setup, Deflate's configuration includes some basics checks to address this issue.

I have initially tried your suggestion, and i saw nothing delightful in the response headers, or initial browser test. I shall try a few variations of my htaccess. I do recall checking the server modules, and saw no DEFLATE and GZIP modules, so i assumed they weren't using a custom build.

You won't find deflate module in Apache's module directory because it should be statically compiled.

If you have a root access to your server, you can check whether

• Apache is compiled with mod_deflate by executing
  

  httpd -l | grep deflate

• the server was installed with custombuild by executing
  

  cat /root/.custombuild

  If you don't get an error message "No such file or directory" it means you are using a custombuild.
  Another way of checking it is by looking at the content of /usr/local/directadmin/ directory. It should include custombuild or customapache directory.

I tried the tool at http://www.dnsqueries.com/en/check_http_gzip.php which 'checks if a specific web page sends out the correct headers needed to transmit compressed content to the browser', and reported: The 'http server hasn't sent out a "Content-Encoding" header'.

Such tools should be used with caution because you don't know what "User-agent" value they provide during HTTP/1.1 negotiation.
Like I previously said, some browsers known to have issues with compressed content might be denied gzip encoding even though the server supports it.
For the ultimate check, use curl

curl --compressed -i --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)" 'http://www.example.com' | head -15

and test it with different user-agent values.

 

[chuee]

It's a shame I do not have ssh access on the server.
I am using safari as a browser and it should be good. I assume the issue isn't with Safari as i have found it to work elsewhere. For the DirectAdmin server in question, I switched servers to ssend javascript and css, and they do get sent encoded, with gzip accepted in the response header. I tried with a htaccess stripped of rewrite rules, but same story.
So I conclude I don't have deflate.

Thanks for your kind replies Webcart.