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
    Being a Dev Dad

    I get asked loads of questions every day but I'm always surprised that they're rarely questions about code or even tech -- many of the questions I get are more about non-dev stuff like what my office is like, what software I use, and oftentimes...

  • By
    Conquering Impostor Syndrome

    Two years ago I documented my struggles with Imposter Syndrome and the response was immense.  I received messages of support and commiseration from new web developers, veteran engineers, and even persons of all experience levels in other professions.  I've even caught myself reading the post...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Custom Cursors

    Remember the Web 1.0 days where you had to customize your site in every way possible?  You abused the scrollbars in Internet Explorer, of course, but the most popular external service I can remember was CometCursor.  CometCursor let you create and use loads of custom cursors for...

  • By
    Hot Effect: MooTools Drag Opacity

    As you should already know, the best visual features of a website are usually held within the most subtle of details. One simple trick that usually makes a big different is the use of opacity and fading. Another awesome MooTools functionality is...

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!