build_psol — Build PageSpeed Optimization Library (PSOL) Binaries with Docker

⚠️ End of life. Apache abandoned incubator-pagespeed-mod. Our final contribution to this project is dated 2026-05-24. We will leave the repository up so existing installs can still rebuild PSOL on modern distributions, but no further development is planned. If you are evaluating PageSpeed for a new deployment, don't — see the alternatives below.

build_psol produces statically-linked psol-<dist>.tar.xz archives — the PageSpeed Optimization Library that ngx_pagespeed (and mod_pagespeed) links against. We run each build inside a Docker container per target distribution, so the resulting binary is glibc-correct for that release.

Tarballs in this repo are built from apache/incubator-pagespeed-mod pinned to commit 409bd76 (the last known-good revision before Bazel broke the tree), with patches applied to make it compile on modern glibc and gcc.

Pre-built binaries

The binaries/ directory ships ready-to-use PSOL tarballs for:

Family	Codename	Status
Debian 11	bullseye	✅
Debian 12	bookworm	✅
Debian 13	trixie	✅
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS	jammy	✅
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS	noble	✅
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS	resolute	✅
Ubuntu 18.04	bionic	legacy (no rebuild planned)
Ubuntu 20.04	focal	legacy (no rebuild planned)
Ubuntu 16.04	xenial	legacy (no rebuild planned)
Ubuntu 14.04	trusty	legacy (no rebuild planned)

Each tarball expands to a psol/ directory containing pagespeed_automatic.a (the static archive) plus the include headers that ngx_pagespeed's configure step needs.

Building from source

git clone https://github.com/eilandert/build_psol
cd build_psol
./build.sh

The default DISTS list builds all six modern targets. To rebuild only one or two:

DISTS="trixie:debian-base bookworm:debian-base" ./build.sh

build.sh is idempotent — re-running it reuses the cloned source tree under src/, the shared ccache under .ccache/, and the docker layer cache. Each container build invokes gyp_chromium and install/build_psol.sh, strips debug symbols, and repacks the result as psol-<dist>.tar.xz.

Requirements on the build host

• Docker
• About 30 GB of disk (source tree + ccache + per-dist intermediates)
• A reasonably modern CPU — the resulting binaries are tuned for the x86-64-v2 baseline (Sandy Bridge / 2011 and later)

What's in the Docker images

Each per-dist image is based on eilandert/ubuntu-base or eilandert/debian-base. At image build time we install build-essential, ccache, eatmydata, and a curated dependency set. At container run time bootstrap.sh handles dist-specific tweaks (Python 2 from the bullseye archive on dists that removed it, glibc fixups for sys_siglist and friends, gcc-12+ flag relaxations).

Why is PageSpeed dead?

The short version:

• Google stepped back. Apache adopted the project as an incubator, but no new code lands and the security backlog is open-ended.

The full story, including a pre-mortem and what we tried, is here:

• Google PageSpeed For NGINX: What It Was, Why It Died & What To Use Instead
• Original upstream thread: apache/incubator-pagespeed-ngx#1760

What to use instead

PageSpeed bundled compression, image optimisation, minification, and caching into one module. Modern stacks pull those apart and each piece is now done better by something else:

• Compression — Use zstd or Brotli at the NGINX layer. Both ship as dynamic modules in our packages.
• Image optimisation — Optimise at upload time, not at request time. Squoosh, ImageMagick, cwebp/avifenc, or a CDN with image transforms (Cloudflare Images, Bunny.net Optimizer). For WordPress: EWWW Image Optimizer, ShortPixel.
• Minification — Build-time tooling (Vite, esbuild, Webpack) for any code you control. For CMS-driven sites where you don't control the build, let your CDN do edge-side minify.
• Page caching — NGINX FastCGI / proxy cache. Simpler, more predictable, and dramatically faster than PageSpeed's on-disk cache. See the NGINX performance guide.
• Everything at once — Put Cloudflare (or another CDN) in front of your site. PageSpeed was a single-server CDN emulator; using an actual CDN is the modern answer.

Documentation mirror

The official modpagespeed.com documentation is gone. A mirror lives at pagespeed.myguard.nl — refer to that for filter configuration and directive reference.

Project links

• This builder: github.com/eilandert/build_psol
• Our NGINX/Angie packages: deb.myguard.nl/nginx-modules/
• PageSpeed end-of-life writeup: PageSpeed for NGINX — what it was, why it died, what to use instead
• Docs mirror: pagespeed.myguard.nl
• Upstream (archived): apache/incubator-pagespeed-mod

License

Build scripts: same Apache-2.0 license as the upstream PageSpeed project. Pre-built PSOL binaries are derivative works of incubator-pagespeed-mod and carry its Apache-2.0 license.