Serve SVG as an Image on Apache with .htaccess

By  on  

I've been a massive fan of SVG since my days creating charts and animations with the Dojo Toolkit.  SVG has been around forever, it even has IE support now, and it's ultra-flexible.  When creating this site's redesign, I used SVG within an IMG tag and it work great locally.  When I pushed to the live server, however, the image displayed as broken and I saw the following notice in the console:

Resource interpreted as Image but transferred with MIME type text/xml: "https://davidwalsh.name/logo.svg".

That was certainly unexpected.  Obviously there was a difference in my local server and my production server, so after a bit of research, I found that the following .htaccess update would resolve the issue:

AddType image/svg+xml svg svgz
AddEncoding gzip svgz

Serving SVG as XML, what it essentially is, really isn't of use to me -- I want to use it in its visual glory.  Keep this snippet handy in case you also run into this issue!

Recent Features

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

  • By
    Create a CSS Cube

    CSS cubes really showcase what CSS has become over the years, evolving from simple color and dimension directives to a language capable of creating deep, creative visuals.  Add animation and you've got something really neat.  Unfortunately each CSS cube tutorial I've read is a bit...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

  1. Nice, I always missed that one. But isn’t it better to user dots before the file endings? In the original documentation for AddType the example says so.

    AddType image/svg+xml .svg .svgz
    
  2. With which MIME type will it be transferred after adding this configuration?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!