Serve gzipped files with Express.JS

Assuming you have minified, gzipped versions of your static javascript files already available (i.e. jquery.min.js.gz) you can serve the compressed files relatively easily. You don't really need to use on-the-fly gzip compression. The obvious benefit is faster page loading.  Although it might seem like a small thing, saving a few kilobytes here and there in the midst of MB-sized downloads, such small performance optimizations can and *do* have a noticeable impact on responsiveness and overall user experience... just ask Thomas Fuchs.

If you had, for example, myscript.js, you could simply do this:

uglifyjs -nc myscript.js > myscript.min.js

cat myscript.min.js | gzip > myscript.min.js.gz

And then with a simple bit of URL re-writing, serve the compressed version whenever a supported browser requests the minified version:

Express 2.x :

// basic URL rewrite to serve gzipped versions of *.min.js files
app.get('*.min.js', function (req, res, next) {
  req.url = req.url + '.gz';
  res.header('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
  next();
});

Express 3.x :

app.get('*.min.js', function (req, res, next) {
  req.url = req.url + '.gz';
  res.set('Content-Encoding', 'gzip');
  next();
});

Now, if the browser requests "./js/myscript.min.js", it will actually get a copy of myscript.min.js.gz from that URL, without doing a redirect, and the browser will automatically decompress the file and use it in the normal way.

If your scripts are small to start with, the benefits won't be that great. Concatenating all your scripts together, then compressing them, could offer a major improvement over several smaller files.

Note that this doesn't check to see which files actually have gzipped versions available, so you would need to be diligent about keeping your files current, or write a simple function to cache a list of the available gzipped files at run time.