Support for pre-compressed assets and brotli compression

[curbengh]

GitHub Pages currently support on-the-fly gzip compression. Since it’s resource-intensive, usually the compression level is not set to high/max. Users can instead opt for pre-compressing the assets using the maximum compression level. There are Jekyll plugins (1, 2, 3 @philnash) that enable users to do that easily. I’m not sure Pages actually utilize pre-compressed assets or not, but it would benefit Github (in reducing CPU resource and bandwidth) if that’s the case.

All major browsers support brotli since the end of 2017.

TL;DR : Suggest to support gzip and brotli pre-compressed assets and brotli on-the-fly compression.

[lee-dohm]

Thanks for this feedback! We’re always working to improve GitHub and the GitHub Community Forum, and we consider every suggestion we receive. I’ve logged your feature request in our internal feature request list. Though I can’t guarantee anything or share a timeline for this, I can tell you that it’s been shared with the appropriate teams for consideration.

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

[vchirikov]

Was this implemented?

[curbengh]

I have a test page with pre-br-compressed files and gh page still serves gzip.

[iSeiryu]

It returns br now. How did you achieve it? I see your repo has both gzip and br files and browser sends Accept-Encoding | gzip, deflate, br.

[Semro]

@iSeiryu it fetches br compressed files from CDN.

[evangoad]

I have done a similar test as @curbengh. Still looks like Github Pages is not serving pre-compressed brotli assets. Interestingly, you can serve pre-compressed brotli assets from Gitlab Pages, I have a demo here: evangoad.gitlab.io

[runspired]

Any update?

[wfd2018]

I don't think that anything is happening with this issue. I have tried a few times to deploy here but have had no luck with this brotli website that I made, but it renders well locally with http-server from npm. I will try Netlify and gitlab..

[jprendes]

Posting in case anyone else may find it useful.
As a stop-gap solution I created a service worker that attempts to fetch and decompress the brotli precompressed assets.
https://github.com/jprendes/service-worker-brotli
https://www.npmjs.com/package/service-worker-brotli

[funjoker]

4years+ still nothing yet ?

[cizordj]

Exactly

[mobeicanyue]

5 years still nothing yet ?

[cizordj]

There is a solution for this: Cloudflare pages. Thank me later.

[whatjakecodes]

Curious if any support is planned for this. Would be great for embedding Unity WebGL games into a Github Pages site.

[wakeupingear]

Came here for this. Unity WebGL is enabling brotli by default (for good reasons!) and hosting a game on pages is an extremely common use-case, especially for portfolio sites.
@whatjakecodes As a stopgap, you can switch to a different compression type in Publishing Settings

[cizordj]

Don't use pre compression on Unity games if you are intending to host them on Github pages, the webserver already compresses them in gzip and if you need brotli support then move to another service like Cloudflare pages which supports brotli compression.

[zkkzkk32312]

Don't use pre compression on Unity games if you are intending to host them on Github pages, the webserver already compresses them in gzip and if you need brotli support then move to another service like Cloudflare pages which supports brotli compression.

so when building webGL that are intended to be hosted on Github Pages, use no compression instead of Gzip? doesn't Gzip actually requires you to send Gzip related headers?

[cizordj]

GitHub Pages will automatically gzip your files for users whose browsers support it. You can verify this by uploading your files and checking the HTTP headers.

[zkkzkk32312]

GitHub Pages will automatically gzip your files for users whose browsers support it. You can verify this by uploading your files and checking the HTTP headers.

I was able to make a build with Gzip compression and decompression fall back checked, and host it on Github pages. Size went down from 100MB to 57MB and since github supports Gzip, all you have to do is check the decompression fallback.