Tag Archives: Apache

RewriteRule: How to avoid passing query string when you redirect.

8 Replies

Today I ran into an issue which I could not figure out for quite a while. I was trying to redirect a url to another url using RewriteRule. It was supposed to be a pretty straightforward redirect which made it even more annoying than complicated ones. Hopefully somebody is able to explain what I am missing here and if my solution is a good solution or not.

I needed to redirect a url:  http://www.example.com/testpage.php?foo=bar to http://www.example.com/

So I added this to .htaccess file:

RewriteRule ^testpage\.php / [R=301,L]

This did do a 301 redirect as I wanted but query string passed so my redirected url looked like:  http://www.example.com/?foo=bar

Obviously this is not what I wanted so in order for me to fix it, I had to take a rather lame approach.  My new redirect is:

RewriteRule ^testpage\.php /? [R=301,L]

The only difference is the “?” after / for target url.  I am just curious to know why query-string was passed.  I have not used rewrites for long time but I do not remember this behavior.

Apache2 gzip compression: How do I speed up my website download time?

15 Replies

One of the things people tend to forget is the ability for web servers to compress content before sending it back to client. Client’s browser then uncompresses the data and displays it to the user. Pretty much all of the recent browsers support gzip compression. In this post, I will go over how to setup apache2 to use compression. First let’s see if your Apache installation has “deflate” enabled. You can check to see if you have deflate by typing:

# /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -t -D DUMP_MODULES
Loaded Modules:
...
deflate_module (static)
...
Syntax OK

If you don’t have have deflate_module, you would have to recompile your apache with “–enable-deflate” option.

Going forward, I am going to assume you have deflate_module. Add the following to your apache conf file:

<Location />
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip\
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
</Location>

The main thing you need to configure is the line which says “no-gzip dont-vary” also in bold above. This tells apache to not compress certain type of files. I have noticed on some of my sites that swf (flash) files do not work as expected if they are compressed. So if you have swf files in your site, you may want to add |swf right after png.

This is all what it takes for you to enable gzip compression in Apache2. Once you restart your apache so it reads the conf file, you can test if your site is getting compressed or not by using this tool: http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

Here are the results for my blog:

Results for: http://crazytoon.com
Web page compressed? Yes
Compression type? gzip
Size, Markup (bytes) 57,337
Size, Compressed (bytes) 11,666
Compression % 79.7

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DISCLAIMER: Please be smart and use code found on internet carefully. Make backups often. And yeah.. last but not least.. I am not responsible for any damage caused by this posting. Use at your own risk.