A common tactic to increase performance and decrease bandwidth is to compress HTTP responses. This is particularly useful for text content such as the CSS, JavaScript, and HTML that are fundamental to the web. There are several different methods for configuring compression in Apache, but most have subtle (or not so subtle) issues. This post continues the series of MultiViews posts (after the earlier XHTML and ErrorDocuments posts) by outlining the problems encountered in popular compression configurations and how to avoid them using MultiViews.

Note: Readers who are not interested in the tradeoffs or potential issues are advised to skip to the end for the working configuration.

Non-MultiViews Methods

In order to motivate the choice of MultiViews for serving pre-compressed content, it’s useful to consider the popular alternatives. The first is using mod_deflate to compress response content on the fly. This works well for dynamic content, but wastes resources for static content, which is needlessly recompressed for each request.

This limitation of mod_deflate is prominently mentioned in the documentation, which recommends using mod_rewrite to rewrite requests to their compressed alternatives when appropriate. Although this method can work (and I recommended it to get the desired behavior for XHTML) it has the major drawback that you are reimplementing content negotiation (which mod_negotiation was designed to do) and are likely to get it wrong and lack features supported by mod_negotiation. Some common problems and pitfalls with this approach:

  • Sending an incorrect or missing Content-Encoding header.
  • Not sending the Vary header or setting it incorrectly (overwriting previous values for other headers which cause the response to vary).
  • Sending Content-Type: application/x-gzip instead of the underlying type.
  • Sending double-gzipped content due to forgetting to set no-gzip in the environment to exclude the response from mod_deflate.
  • Not respecting client preferences (i.e. quality values/qvalues). According to RFC 7231 (and RFC 2616 before it) clients can send a numeric value between 0 and 1 (inclusive) to express their relative preference for each encoding. An Accept-Encoding: gzip;q=0 header would signify that the client wants “anything but gzip”. Most mod_rewrite implementations would send them gzip. A more realistic example would be a client that sends Accept-Encoding: br;q=1, gzip;q=0.5, deflate;q=0.1 to signify that they prefer Brotli, then gzip, then deflate. Writing mod_rewrite rules which properly handle these sorts of expressed preferences is extremely difficult.

In addition to the above issues, this approach requires writing a redirect rule for each supported combination of negotiated values. Supporting gzip encoding for a few file extensions is reasonable, but if additional types and encodings are added (much less languages or charsets) it quickly becomes unreasonable. It also doesn’t support any of the features of Transparent Content Negotiation which are supported out of the box by mod_negotiation.

Building A Solution Using MultiViews

Prerequisites

As in previous posts, we will build up a solution iteratively, tackling problems as they appear. For this to work, mod_mime and mod_negotiation must be enabled/loaded. On Debian and related distributions this can be done by running a2enmod mime and a2enmod negotiation as root. Additionally, mod_deflate should not be applied to negotiated files/types. This can be accomplished by removing its default configuration symlink at /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/deflate.conf or disabling the module with a2dismod -f deflate.

The following examples use the domain localhost and assume the file style.css.gz exists in the site root.

First Steps

We start by simply enabling MultiViews and declaring the extension .gz to identify the gzip encoding using following configuration (which must be inside a <Directory> directive or .htaccess file, as noted in the description of the MultiViews value for Options):

Options +MultiViews
AddEncoding gzip .gz

If we test the result using curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://localhost/style.css we get something like the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 01:11:40 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Content-Location: style.css.gz
Vary: negotiate,accept-encoding
TCN: choice
Last-Modified: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 01:04:11 GMT
ETag: "538-5469058274adb;546906978a4c6"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1336
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Encoding: gzip

Notice that the server sent a response with the correct Content-Type and Content-Encoding and as a bonus it included the TCN headers to inform clients that the result was negotiated and there may be other representations available. Hurray!

Non-Negotiated Files

Not so fast! If we add an uncompressed style.css file to the site root, the same request returns:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 01:15:34 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Last-Modified: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:05:41 GMT
ETag: "f9d-5468f86e84147"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 3997
Content-Type: text/css

This response is neither negotiated or compressed! What happened? Unfortunately, MultiViews only negotiates requests for files which do not exist. After adding style.css the request matched the uncompressed file exactly, so the response was not negotiated and the uncompressed file was sent. This makes what we are trying to do particularly difficult (Bug 60619).

A solution is to rename the uncompressed file with an additional extension such as .orig or .id (for the identity encoding) and include that extension in negotiation. This could be done by adding MultiviewsMatch Any, although this risks matching unexpected file types (e.g. if a type is not assigned to .md5, .asc, .torrent or other additional extensions). It could also be done by assigning .orig to a negotiated feature. The obvious choice would be encoding: AddEncoding identity .orig. Unfortunately, this does not work as expected since Apache treats the identity encoding differently from an unspecified encoding with undesired results (e.g. gzip is served for requests without Accept-Encoding because it is smaller than the uncompressed file). Another option would be to assign .orig to a default charset or language, such as AddCharset utf-8 .orig or AddLanguage en .orig if all compressed files are UTF-8 or English. A third option, which I find more appealing, is to use a no-op filter or handler such as the default-handler and allow MultiViews to match extensions assigned to handlers:

Options +MultiViews
AddEncoding gzip .gz
MultiviewsMatch Handlers
AddHandler default-handler .orig

After a bit more digging, I found François Marier has an even better solution of doubling the type extension. So style.css is saved as style.css.css on the server and requests for /style.css are negotiated between style.css.css (no encoding) and style.css.gz (gzip encoding). This has the added advantage of not interfering with the type-detection of any other tools which may open the file on the server that do not recognize the .orig file extension.

Fixing Incorrect .gz Type

A problem with the above solution appears if we request style.css.gz directly or request style without an extension to negotiate the Content-Type.1 Consider the result for curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" http://localhost/style:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 01:08:30 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Debian)
Content-Location: style.css.gz
Vary: negotiate,accept,accept-encoding
TCN: choice
Last-Modified: Thu, 21 Jan 2017 01:00:51 GMT
ETag: "536-529cda2456c78;529cdb967800b"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1334
Content-Type: application/x-gzip
Content-Encoding: gzip

This is all sorts of wrong (although it is common enough that Firefox detects it and provides a workaround). We wanted to send the browser a stylesheet, but instead we sent it a gzip file (according to Content-Type) which is gzipped (according to Content-Encoding). We actually sent it the same gzipped stylesheet, but with the wrong Content-Type. This is because Debian (and related distributions) set AddType application/x-gzip .gz in their default configuration (in /etc/apache2/mods-available/mime.conf), so for style.css.gz the .gz is being interpreted as both the type and the encoding of the file. This can be fixed using RemoveType as follows:

Options +MultiViews
RemoveType .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

With this fix, the response now includes the correct headers, as in the first example response above. Unfortunately, we’ve introduced a new problem. Suppose we are hosting a gzipped-tarball launch-codes.tar.gz. Requesting it results in a response similar to the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 2016 01:32:51 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.18 (Debian)
Last-Modified: Thu, 21 Jan 2017 01:27:34 GMT
ETag: "3b709-529ce01dc4107"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 243465
Content-Type: application/x-tar
Content-Encoding: gzip

This tells the browser that we are sending it a tar file which is compressed for transmission. So, if the browser didn’t have workarounds for this brokenness too), it would decompress the response content and save the file as launch-codes.tar (or worse launch-codes.tar.gz) with uncompressed content. What we actually wanted was to send a gzipped file with no additional content encoding. We can achieve that by adding some further configuration to .tar.gz files:

Options +MultiViews
RemoveType .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
<FilesMatch ".+\.tar\.gz$">
    RemoveEncoding .gz
    AddType application/gzip .gz
</FilesMatch>

This approach can easily be extended to any other compound file extensions that should be saved without gunzipping by altering the FilesMatch expression. It uses the application/gzip type of RFC 6713, which is the official type of gzip files, but which lacks the same browser support as the legacy application/x-gzip type. Administrators concerned about older browsers should use the legacy type. Also, as a matter of style, the configuration could have used ForceType instead of AddType within the FilesMatch directive.

With this configuration we have eliminated all of the previous issues and achieved the desired result. It can also be extend to include additional encodings easily, as we will demonstrate.

Adding Brotli

Now that we have found a working solution using MultiViews, lets add support for Brotli as icing on the cake.

The first question is what extension to use, since the brotli tool does not provide one. Using .br analogously to .gz provokes a conflict with the ISO 639 language code for Breton, which is configured by default (but can be addressed by RemoveLanguage .br). Using .bro as suggested in this pull request has already been rejected by Mozilla. So lets use .brotli as a neutral, if verbose, choice.

Options +MultiViews
RemoveType .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddEncoding br .brotli
<FilesMatch ".+\.tar\.gz$">
    RemoveEncoding .gz
    AddType application/gzip .gz
</FilesMatch>

If we then create style.css.brotli with brotli < style.css.orig > style.css.brotli, a test request with curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: br' http://localhost/style.css yields:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 03:07:00 GMT
Server: Apache/2.4.25 (Debian)
Content-Location: style.css.brotli
Vary: negotiate,accept-encoding
TCN: choice
Last-Modified: Sat, 21 Jan 2017 03:05:02 GMT
ETag: "43b-54692084e8c35;546920f3c26ac"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 1083
Content-Type: text/css
Content-Encoding: br

Hurrah!

The MultiViews Method

The final configuration, which addresses all of the above issues is:

# Enable MultiViews for content negotiation
Options +MultiViews

# Treat .gz as gzip encoding, not application/gzip type
RemoveType .gz
AddEncoding gzip .gz

# Treat .brotli as br encoding
# Note:  If using .br for brotli, uncomment the following line:
#RemoveLanguage .br
AddEncoding br .brotli

# As an exception, send .tar.gz files as gzip type, not gzip encoding
<FilesMatch ".+\.tar\.gz$">
    RemoveEncoding .gz
    # Note:  Can use application/x-gzip for backwards-compatibility
    AddType application/gzip .gz
    # Alternatively:
    #ForceType application/gzip
</FilesMatch>

This configuration requires that uncompressed files be renamed with a double-extension (e.g. style.css.css) unless one of the alternatives in the Non-Negotiated Files section is used.

This configuration intentionally omits support for deflate encoding due to compatibility issues and no significant use case that I am aware of, since all browsers which support deflate support gzip. It could be easily added with AddEncoding deflate .zlib or similar if desired.

This configuration also does not provide a FilesMatch for .tar.brotli since this format is not currently widely used. When serving tarballs that should be saved as brotli-compressed, add a FilesMatch directive analogous to the one for tar.gz. Doing so is left as an exercise for the reader.

If you encounter issues with this solution, please let me know. Otherwise, best of luck serving pre-compressed files with Apache!

Article Changes

2017-01-20

  • Added Non-Negotiated Files section discussing how to handle requests matching uncompressed files being non-negotiated.
  • Added more headings and moved brotli into its own section to make the post easier to skim.

  1. Although type negotiation is not often used for stylesheets, it is currently used to negotiate WebP, XHTML, and in some REST APIs. ↩