How to force Apache to use manually pre-compressed gz file of CSS and JS files?
I have simple question. I have webdirectory /css and inside is file style.css. I have manually gzipped this file and saved it as style.css.gz. I want to save CPU cycles to not have CSS file compressed at each request. How do I configure Apache to look for this .gz file and serve it instead of compressing .css file over and over again ?
Note: I don't want Apache to create .gz file itself. In my scenario I have to create .css.gz file manually - using PHP on specific requests.
Answer
Some RewriteRule should handle that quite well.
In a Drupal configuration file I found:
# AddEncoding allows you to have certain browsers uncompress information on the fly.
AddEncoding gzip .gz
#Serve gzip compressed CSS files if they exist and the client accepts gzip.
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.gz -s
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.css $1\.css\.gz [QSA]
# Serve gzip compressed JS files if they exist and the client accepts gzip.
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}\.gz -s
RewriteRule ^(.*)\.js $1\.js\.gz [QSA]
# Serve correct content types, and prevent mod_deflate double gzip.
RewriteRule \.css\.gz$ - [T=text/css,E=no-gzip:1]
RewriteRule \.js\.gz$ - [T=text/javascript,E=no-gzip:1]
This will make the job. You can put that either in a <Directory foo/> section or in a .htaccess file if you do not have access to apache configuration or if you want to slowdown your webserver.