HTTP Compression on Redhat / CentOS / Fedora

I was doing some testing on my server the other day, and realised that http compression within apache (httpd) was not enabled by default. Further digging showed me that mod_defate was what I needed, and infact it was installed by default on my CentOS box.

How to enable mod_default on Centos: Create /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf with the following contents

     # Insert filter
     SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

     # Netscape 4.x has some problems...
     BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

     # Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
     BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

     # MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
     BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

     # Don't compress images
     SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

        # Don't compress already compressed stuff !
        SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:exe|t?gz|zip|bz2|sit|rar)$ no-gzip dont-vary
        SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .pdf$ no-gzip dont-vary

     # Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
     Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary

        # Log Stuff !
#        DeflateFilterNote Input input_info
#        DeflateFilterNote Output output_info
#        DeflateFilterNote Ratio ratio_info
#        LogFormat '"%r" %{output_info}n/%{input_info}n (%{ratio_info}n%%)' deflate
#        CustomLog /var/log/httpd/deflate_log deflate

restart httpd (/etc/init.d/httpd restart) and your done :-)

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