caching - How to force Apache to use manually pre-compressed gz file of CSS and JS files?

Question

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 1

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.