I need a manual compression solution on Apache. My goals:

Provide gzip-encoded content on my server along with uncompressed.
Files are pre-compressed.
Not all files are served compressed. I want to specify these files and the choice isn't type (extension) based.
Many content-types (custom ones) are served, and new types are showing up from time to time. Also, file extension doesn't determine if it will be compressed or not (!!!).
Keep overhead minimal (the less extra headers, the better).
Always provide Content-Length header and never send chunked response (this disqualifies mod_deflate).

Ideal Functionality

Ideal functionality would work like that:

Web client asks for file file.ext.
If file.ext.gz exists on server:
- Content-Encoding is set to gzip.
- Content-Type is set to value of file.ext (!!!).
- Server returns file.ext.gz.
Otherwise, file.ext is returned.

I tested a number of solutions, this article contains a good compilation, but there was always a problem with parts marked with (!!!). I have hundreds of thousands of files and dozens of content types and because of that I'm looking for some automatic solution, without need of adding ForceType for each file.

What I tried

Multiviews

How this works:

Rename a file file.ext to file.ext.en
Create a file file.ext.gz

Configure Apache:

Options +MultiViews
AddEncoding x-gzip .gz
RemoveType .gz

Works almost as expected, except it requires the original file (file.ext) to not exist and it adds many (useless to me) headers (TCN, Content-Language and few more) that can't be removed (Header unset doesn't remove them).

Rewrite

How this works: - Create file.ext.gz file. - Configure Apache:

<pre>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
RewriteRule (.*)$ $1.gz [L]
AddEncoding x-gzip .gz

<Files file.ext>
    ForceType my-custom/mime-type
</FilesMatch>
</pre>

This works well, but requires a ForceType for each compressed file. As I said before, I can't rely on extensions because not all files of certain type will be compressed.

`mod_deflate`

I didn't investigate it too much, the problem is that if file is too big, then it's split into pieces and sent in chunks and Content-Length is not provided. Increasing size of compression buffers can't eliminate this problem.

Is it possible at all to configure Apache to work as I'd liked to?

I tried to dynamically get Content-Type of file.ext and set it to file.ext.gz, but I didn't find the way how to do this.