Do most shared hosts handle gzipped files?

Question

I get them theoretically, but I'm grappling with gzipping files in practice. How should I go about gzip compressing my files, and what needs to be done in order to use them on a shared host?

Would the following work?

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} .*gzip.*
RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.js$ /$1.js.gz [L]
RewriteRule ^/(.*)\.css$ /$1.css.gz [L]
AddEncoding x-gzip text.gz

Answer 1

You're probably going to have trouble with the MIME type of the decompressed content still being application/gzip-compressed rather than text/css or text/javascript.

What is your purpose in doing this? If you just want to cut down on network transfers, you should do that using mod_deflate, eg.:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/javascript

and let Apache worry about compressing the transfers themselves on the fly. Otherwise browsers that can't negotiate gzip will be stuck.

I would hope a decent shared host would have already set compression for you. Use an online tool to check whether your stylesheets are being served compressed.