How To Enable GZIP Compression/mod_deflate in Apache

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This is something quite easy to do.

Check that the deflate module is installed

# apachectl -M | grep deflate
 deflate_module (shared)
Syntax OK

Check the content encoding is enabled by using curl on the site

# curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' http://somewebsite.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2017 11:02:16 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: http://somewebsite.com/somesite.php
X-Powered-By: rabbits
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Create a file called /etc/httpd/conf.d/deflate.conf

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript
    DeflateCompressionLevel 8
</ifmodule>

Restart apache2

/etc/init.d/httpd reload
Reloading httpd:

retest the gzip content-encoding directive with curl using Accept-Encoding: gzip directive.


# curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate' http://somesite.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:04:26 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Pingback: http://somesite.com/somesite.php
X-Powered-By: muppets
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip    <---- this line indicates that compression is active
Content-Length: 20
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

For this, thanks to odin.com