Apache2 gzip not working?

I've done almost everything on the internet to gzip my content. It does not seem to work. I've done so much that I can't possibly put everything I've tried here, so here's some of the things I've tried:

I've tried adding this into my .htaccess and I also tried adding it into my apache2.conf and restarting apache.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c> # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers) BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>

They both don't work. I'm on an AWS EC2 Ubuntu server with Apache.

2 Answers

I found the answer... finally!

It was in this code that was something like this:

SetEnvIfExpr no-gzip

It was in my apache2.conf file. Once I removed that code, it worked!

Apache2 say:

One further directive AddOutputFilterByType is still supported, but deprecated. Use dynamic configuration instead.

First I thought that better to use AddOutputFilter directive.

However solution found at How to enable gzip compression on Apache show enough anew way to configure mod_deflate.

Lookalike:

<IfModule mod_mime.c> AddType application/x-javascript .js AddType text/css .css
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> SetOutputFilter DEFLATE <IfModule mod_setenvif.c> SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:rar|zip)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpg|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:avi|mov|mp4)$ no-gzip dont-vary SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.mp3$ no-gzip dont-vary </IfModule> <IfModule mod_headers.c> Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary </IfModule>
</IfModule>

Read subj for a varies.

Example of Apache 1.3 mod_gzip module mean just:

 <ifModule mod_gzip.c> mod_gzip_on Yes mod_gzip_dechunk Yes mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$ mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$ mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.* mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.* mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.* mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.* </ifModule>

look more / found here

And my humble opinion that the part about really old browsers is not very reliable part of your .htaccess …