Serve pre-compressed content with Apache

I wanted to serve compressed static js and css content from an Apache server. I also wanted to pre-compress the files to save time/cpu, and the particular Apache 2 instance had no mod_deflate or mod_gzip installed (dynamic content was being compressed at the application layer).

Serving pre-compressed content turned out to be incredibly easy using mod_rewrite*:

1. Create a compressed copy of each .js & .css file with a .jsgz/.cssgz extension
   

   find . -name '*.js' -or -name '*.css' -exec sh -c 'gzip -c {} > {}gz' \;
   

2. Add the following to a relevant part of your Apache config file:
   

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
   RewriteRule (.*)\.css$ $1\.cssgz [L]
   
   AddType "text/css;charset=UTF-8" .cssgz
   AddEncoding gzip .cssgz
   
   RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
   RewriteRule (.*)\.js$ $1\.jsgz [L]
   
   AddType "text/javascript;charset=UTF-8" .jsgz
   AddEncoding gzip .jsgz

3. Test & reload your apache config
   

   httpd -t
   httpd -k graceful

Voila, correctly served pre-compressed static files. Just be sure to update your compressed versions whenever you update the content.