Install brotli as a php extention/module

Just like gzip, Brotli is also a compression algorithm. It is developed by Google and serves best for text compression. The reason being, it uses a dictionary of common keywords and phrases on both client and server side and thus gives a better compression ratio. It is supported by all major browsers

Gzip vs Brotli

The advantage for Brotli over gzip is that it makes use of a dictionary and thus it only needs to send keys instead of full keywords. According to certsimple,

• Javascript files compressed with Brotli are 14% smaller than gzip.
• HTML files are 21% smaller than gzip.
• CSS files are 17% smaller than gzip.

Install brotili as php module

cd ~
git clone --recursive --depth=1 https://github.com/kjdev/php-ext-brotli.git
cd php-ext-brotli
phpize
./configure
make
make install

Create brotli.ini file in mods-available directory of php conf directory
and add the below line. For php 7.1, /etc/php/7.1/mods-available/brotli.ini

extension=brotli.so

phpenmod brotli
service apache2 restart

Check content-encoding header in the response. If content-encoding : br header is present in the response headers, it’s working fine.