Compress with GZIP the JS file

I have been playing around with Piwik for a little while now and I must say, its a great stats tool. I have a couple of clients with privacy concerns over Google Analytics so enabling them to track their own data (and keep it private) has proved very helpful to them.

To address the YSlow item of “Compress components with gzip” instead of changing the reference point on the tracking code of each website I added a new .htaccess file to the root of the PIWIK stats install (in my case on a subdomain of a different site).

Adding this file with the below would be done instead of changing the reference point of.

[quote=“piwik/js/index.php (or implicitly via piwik/js/) instead of piwik/piwik.js”][/quote]
as noted by vipsoft on thread 20491

All the .htaccess file had included was the below, which is lifted directly from the HTML5 Boilerplate setup…


# ----------------------------------------------------------------------
# Gzip compression
# ----------------------------------------------------------------------

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>

  # Force deflate for mangled headers developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2010/12/pushing-beyond-gzipping/
  <IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
    <IfModule mod_headers.c>
      SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
      RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
    </IfModule>
  </IfModule>

  # HTML, TXT, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, XML, HTC:
  <IfModule filter_module>
    FilterDeclare   COMPRESS
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/html
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/css
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/plain
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $text/x-component
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/javascript
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/json
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/xhtml+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/rss+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/atom+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/vnd.ms-fontobject
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $image/svg+xml
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $image/x-icon
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $application/x-font-ttf
    FilterProvider  COMPRESS  DEFLATE resp=Content-Type $font/opentype
    FilterChain     COMPRESS
    FilterProtocol  COMPRESS  DEFLATE change=yes;byteranges=no
  </IfModule>

  <IfModule !mod_filter.c>
    # Legacy versions of Apache
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css application/json
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml application/xml text/x-component
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml application/rss+xml application/atom+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon image/svg+xml application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/x-font-ttf font/opentype
  </IfModule>

</IfModule>

So whilst this doesn’t appear to give the admin area of Piwik any speed boost (its very fast already) it does send the deflated file to your sites that are requesting the piwik.js file. Feel free to play around with the full contents of the boilerplate .htaccess file, there are a lot of goodies in there.

Hope this helps someone else looking to speed things up on their website.