Flask-Compress 1.6.0

Compress responses in your Flask app with gzip or brotli.

Flask-Compress

Flask-Compress allows you to easily compress your Flask application's responses with gzip.

The preferred solution is to have a server (like Nginx) automatically compress the static files for you. If you don't have that option Flask-Compress will solve the problem for you.

How it works

Flask-Compress both adds the various headers required for a compressed response and compresses the response data. This makes serving compressed static files extremely easy.

Internally, every time a request is made the extension will check if it matches one of the compressible MIME types and whether the client and the server use some common compression algorithm, and will automatically attach the appropriate headers.

To determine the compression algorithm, the Accept-Encoding request header is inspected, respecting the quality factor as described in MDN docs. If no requested compression algorithm is supported by the server, we don't compress the response. If, on the other hand, multiple suitable algorithms are found and are requested with the same quality factor, we choose the first one defined in the COMPRESS_ALGORITHM option (see below).

Installation

If you use pip then installation is simply:

$ pip install flask-compress

or, if you want the latest github version:

$ pip install git+git://github.com/colour-science/flask-compress.git

You can also install Flask-Compress via Easy Install:

$ easy_install flask-compress

Using Flask-Compress

Flask-Compress is incredibly simple to use. In order to start gzip'ing your Flask application's assets, the first thing to do is let Flask-Compress know about your flask.Flask application object.

from flask import Flask
from flask_compress import Compress

app = Flask(__name__)
Compress(app)

In many cases, however, one cannot expect a Flask instance to be ready at import time, and a common pattern is to return a Flask instance from within a function only after other configuration details have been taken care of. In these cases, Flask-Compress provides a simple function, flask_compress.Compress.init_app, which takes your application as an argument.

from flask import Flask
from flask_compress import Compress

compress = Compress()

def start_app():
    app = Flask(__name__)
    compress.init_app(app)
    return app

In terms of automatically compressing your assets using gzip, passing your flask.Flask object to the flask_compress.Compress object is all that needs to be done.

Options

Within your Flask application's settings you can provide the following settings to control the behavior of Flask-Compress. None of the settings are required.

Option	Description	Default
COMPRESS_MIMETYPES	Set the list of mimetypes to compress here.	[ 'text/html', 'text/css', 'text/xml', 'application/json', 'application/javascript' ]
COMPRESS_LEVEL	Specifies the gzip compression level.	6
COMPRESS_MIN_SIZE	Specifies the minimum file size threshold for compressing files.	500
COMPRESS_CACHE_KEY	Specifies the cache key method for lookup/storage of response data.	None
COMPRESS_CACHE_BACKEND	Specified the backend for storing the cached response data.	None
COMPRESS_REGISTER	Specifies if compression should be automatically registered.	True
COMPRESS_ALGORITHM	Supported compression algorithms.	['br', 'gzip']