I’m not going to write about whether I think mod_pagespeed is good or not, is it suitable for your website, why you should use it or not. I’ll focus only on installation.

Since you’re here and still reading I assume you want to speed up your website with Google’s mod_pagespeed. If you’re on a machine where for any reason installing from .rpm or .deb is not possible read on.

Dependencies

First we need to install Chromium ‘depot_tools’, which are used to build multiple open-source projects with dependencies on other open-source projects.

mkdir ~/bin
cd ~/bin
svn co http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/tools/depot_tools

You will need to add the depot_tools to your path. i.e. in bash:

export PATH=$PATH:~/bin/depot_tools

Check out mod_pagespeed and dependencies

mkdir ~/mod_pagespeed    # any directory is fine
cd ~/mod_pagespeed
# always check for latest version by going to http://modpagespeed.googlecode.com/svn/tags/ in your browser
# then copy link to /src ie. http://modpagespeed.googlecode.com/svn/tags/X.X.X.X/src
gclient config  http://modpagespeed.googlecode.com/svn/tags/0.9.1.1/src
gclient sync --force     # this will download all source code

Compile mod_pagespeed

cd ~/mod_pagespeed/src
make BUILDTYPE=Release   # BUILDTYPE defaults to 'Debug'

Install mod_pagespeed

First edit centos.sh and change parameters according to your needs. Then run it.

vim install/centos.sh
cd install
./centos.sh
./centos.sh staging
./centos.sh install

Restart Apache

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Check if Apache loaded mod_pagespeed.

httpd -M # list static and shared modules, mod_pagespeed should be here
httpd -l # list compiled in modules

If above doesn’t work try something like this:

/usr/src/httpd/httpd -M
/usr/src/httpd/httpd -l

If it’s there go to /etc/httpd/pagespeed.conf and configure it. I’ll write a bit more about configuring mod_pagespeed in my next post. If it’s not there make sure mod_pagespeed.so is in Apache module directory and if not copy it there.

locate mod_pagespeed.so
cp /tmp/mod_pagespeed.install/mod_pagespeed.so /usr/local/apache2/modules/

Edit your Apache configuration file and add Include /etc/httpd/pagespeed.conf if it isn’t already there. Next edit /etc/httpd/pagespeed.conf and add

LoadModule pagespeed_module /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_pagespeed.so

Restart Apache and you should see something like X-Mod-Pagespeed: 0.9.1.1-173 in your website’s response headers.

References:

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/using_mod.html
http://code.google.com/p/modpagespeed/wiki/HowToBuild