Introduction to Flask-Compress

Flask-Compress is an extension for Flask that allows you to easily compress your Flask application’s responses using Gzip, Brotli, or Deflate. This is a powerful tool for improving the performance of your web application by reducing the size of your responses, which can lead to faster page loads and reduced bandwidth usage.

Installing Flask-Compress

To get started with Flask-Compress, you need to install it using pip:

  pip install flask-compress

Basic Usage

Here’s how to use Flask-Compress in your Flask application:

  from flask import Flask
  from flask_compress import Compress

  app = Flask(__name__)
  Compress(app)

  @app.route('/')
  def index():
      return 'Hello, World!'
  
  if __name__ == '__main__':
      app.run(debug=True)

Configuration Options

Flask-Compress offers several configuration options to customize its behavior:

• COMPRESS_MIMETYPES: A list of MIME types to compress (default: [‘text/html’, ‘text/css’, ‘text/xml’, ‘application/json’, …]).
• COMPRESS_LEVEL: The compression level (default: 6).
• COMPRESS_MIN_SIZE: The minimum response size that will trigger compression (default: 500 bytes).
• COMPRESS_ALGORITHM: The compression algorithm to use (‘gzip’ or ‘br’).

Here is an example of configuring Flask-Compress with custom settings:

  app.config['COMPRESS_MIMETYPES'] = ['text/html', 'text/css', 'application/json']
  app.config['COMPRESS_LEVEL'] = 9
  app.config['COMPRESS_MIN_SIZE'] = 300
  app.config['COMPRESS_ALGORITHM'] = 'br'
  
  Compress(app)

Advanced Usage

Flask-Compress allows you to conditionally compress responses using the compressible decorator. This can be useful for fine-tuning which responses should be compressed:

  from flask_compress import compressible

  @app.route('/heavy')
  @compressible
  def heavy_response():
      return 'This is a heavy response that will be compressed.'

App Example with Multiple APIs

Let’s look at a more comprehensive example, demonstrating the use of Flask-Compress with multiple APIs in a single application:

  from flask import Flask, jsonify
  from flask_compress import Compress

  app = Flask(__name__)
  Compress(app)

  @app.route('/')
  def index():
      return 'Welcome to the Flask-Compress example!'

  @app.route('/json')
  def json_response():
      return jsonify({'message': 'This is a JSON response that will be compressed.'})

  @app.route('/data')
  def data_response():
      data = {"key": "value"} * 1000  # Large response
      return jsonify(data)

  @app.route('/no-compress')
  def no_compress_response():
      return 'This response is not compressed.'

  if __name__ == '__main__':
      app.run(debug=True)

In this example, responses for different routes are served, some of which contain large data sets that benefit from compression.

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