Using gzip / compression in Symfony 2 without mod_deflate - apache

Question

I am working on two different Symfony 2.8 projects running on different servers. It would like to use compression for faster loading. All resources I found point to mod_deflate. But while the first server does not offer mod_deflate at all, the second server cannot use mod_deflate while FastCGI is enabled.
I only found the information, that one can enable compression within the server (mod_deflate) or "in script". But I did not found any detailed on this "in script" solution.
Is is somehow possible to enable compression in Symfony without using mod_deflate?

Answer 1

You can try to gzip content manually in kernel.response event:
namespace AppBundle\EventListener;
use Symfony\Component\EventDispatcher\EventSubscriberInterface;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\KernelEvents;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernelInterface;
class CompressionListener implements EventSubscriberInterface
{
public static function getSubscribedEvents()
{
return array(
KernelEvents::RESPONSE => array(array('onKernelResponse', -256))
);
}
public function onKernelResponse($event)
{
//return;
if ($event->getRequestType() != HttpKernelInterface::MASTER_REQUEST) {
return;
}
$request = $event->getRequest();
$response = $event->getResponse();
$encodings = $request->getEncodings();
if (in_array('gzip', $encodings) && function_exists('gzencode')) {
$content = gzencode($response->getContent());
$response->setContent($content);
$response->headers->set('Content-encoding', 'gzip');
} elseif (in_array('deflate', $encodings) && function_exists('gzdeflate')) {
$content = gzdeflate($response->getContent());
$response->setContent($content);
$response->headers->set('Content-encoding', 'deflate');
}
}
}
And register this listener in config:
app.listener.compression:
class: AppBundle\EventListener\CompressionListener
arguments:
tags:
- { name: kernel.event_subscriber }