Sunday, June 3, 2012

How to Specify "Vary: Accept-Encoding' header in .htaccess


Google PageSpeed says I should "Specify a Vary: Accept-Encoding header" for JS and CSS. How do I do this in .htaccess?



Source: Tips4all

2 comments:

  1. I guess it's meant that you enable gzip compression for your css and js files, cuz that will enable the client to receive both gzip-encoded content and a plain content.

    This is how to do it in apache2:

    <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    #The following line is enough for .js and .css
    AddOutputFilter DEFLATE js css

    #The following line also enables compression by file content type, for the following list of Content-Type:s
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml application/xml

    #The following lines are to avoid bugs with some browsers
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    </IfModule>


    EDIT:
    Here's how to add the Vary Accept-Encoding header: [src]

    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
    <FilesMatch "\.(js|css|xml|gz)$">
    Header append Vary Accept-Encoding
    </FilesMatch>
    </IfModule>

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  2. I'm afraid Aularon didn't provide enough steps to complete the process. With a little trial and error, I was able to successfully enable Gzipping on my dedicated WHM server.

    Below are the steps:


    Run EasyApache within WHM, select Deflate within the Exhaustive Options list, and rebuild the server.
    Once done, goto Services Configuration >> Apache Configuration >> Include Editor >> Post VirtualHost Include, select All Versions, and then paste the mod_headers.c and mod_headers.c code (listed above in Aularon's post) on top of on another within the input field.
    Once saved, I was seeing a 75.36% data savings on average! You can run a before and after test by using this HTTP Compression tool to see your own results: http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/


    Hope this works for you all!


    Matt

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