I followed the steps described on the blogpost The Asset Pipeline, from development to production and tweaked them to my environment. The two important files are: /etc/apache/site-available/example.com <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName example.com ServerAlias www.example.com DocumentRoot "/var/www/sites/example.com/current/public" ErrorLog "/var/log/apache2/example.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/apache2/example.com-access_log" common <Directory "/var/www/sites/example.com/current/public"> Options All AllowOverride All Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> <Directory "/var/www/sites/example.com/current/public/assets"> AllowOverride All </Directory> <LocationMatch "^/assets/.*$"> Header unset Last-Modified Header unset ETag FileETag none ExpiresActive On ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year" </LocationMatch> RewriteEngine On # Remove the www RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L] </VirtualHost> /var/www/sites/example.com/shared/assets/.htaccess RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} \b(x-)?gzip\b RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -s RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [L] <FilesMatch \.css\.gz$> ForceType text/css Header set Content-Encoding gzip </FilesMatch> <FilesMatch \.js\.gz$> ForceType text/javascript Header set Content-Encoding gzip </FilesMatch> But apache seems to send empty gzip files because the testsite looses all styles and firebug doesnt find any content for the css files. Altough if I call the assets-path directly I get some gibberish that looks like binary data. If I move the htaccess-file everything is back to normal. How could I find out where/what went wrong or do you have any suggestions what error I made? > apache2 -v System: Server version: Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Server built: Mar 5 2012 16:42:17 > uname -a Linux node0 2.6.18-028stab094.3 #1 SMP Thu Sep 22 12:47:37 MSD 2011 x86_64 GNU/Linux