Enable gitlab-pages daemon to send precompressed .gz files as response if they are available

The idea is very simple and borrowed from ngx_http_gzip_static_module. Why? Because this will lower the required bandwidth for the pages sites and will help them load faster. Also serving precompiled gzip files will not require additional CPU resources on the server but only from the CI machine.

Basic steps:

1. In the deployment phase of pages site we compress some resources with gzip;
2. Later when the pages daemon servers requests it will check if the HTTP client accepts gzip compressed responses;
3. If client accepts gzip responses and gzipped version exists serve him the precompressed gzip file;
4. If client doesn't accept gzip response or given resource doesn't have precompressed gzip file serve the original file;

Required changes:

I don't know go code but it seem that only changing domain.go will need to be changed. The two functions serveFile and serveCustomFile could check for .gz version of the requested file if the HTTP request has Accept-Encoding: gzip and then serve it. If it doesn't exist try to serve the normal version. The unknown part (for me) is the handling of the Content-encoding: gzip for the response.

Some additional information:

• Why gzip and not deflate: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388595/why-use-deflate-instead-of-gzip-for-text-files-served-by-apache
• Generating the .gz is very easy with .gitlab-ci.yml: https://gitlab.com/zloster/zloster.gitlab.io/blob/master/.gitlab-ci.yml#L6-9

It's good idea :)

I'll be happy to accept MR for this feature if someone decides to contribute :)

Any chances of having this implemented? Taking into consideration cache policies are more or less non-existent, anything which can speed-up page load like compressed .gz.files would be a great addition to GitLab Pages.

Really important thing. Please made it.

Simple and important thing.

P.S. .gitlab-ci.yml:

  script:
  - jekyll build -d public
  - gzip -k -6 -r public/css
  - gzip -k -6 -r public/js

Hey, guys. I try to implement this feature, but I don't know how to test domains on local machine (I don't understand how create file config.json and in what format). Please, if you can — check. upd: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-pages/merge_requests/8

I've spend some time playing with the project and I hit some issues:

• go lint currently requires Go 1.6 as minimum - the lint docs and a failing build;
• I've tried to run the tests locally. I've forked gitlab-pages project without getting the changes from @gordio. I've used Go 1.7 on Windows OS. I had to comment some code so go buildto pass. It seams there some API changes for the setuid and setgid functionality. Apart from this changes there weren't any other. When I've run the tests I've got exactly the same errors as in the @gordio changes: for some reason there is ? appended to the requests but I don't see this ? in the testcase source. And as a result test are failing.

It seems there is some mystery here and we need someone with more Go experience to help.

mentioned in merge request !25 (merged)

mentioned in issue rdpc/nted-wbt-course#34

Closed by !25 (merged)

closed