I'm using python -m SimpleHTTPServer to serve up a directory for local testing in a web browser. Some of the content includes large data files. I would like to be able to gzip them and have SimpleHTTPServer serve them with Content-Encoding: gzip.
Is there an easy way to do this?
This is an old question, but it still ranks #1 in Google for me, so I suppose a proper answer might be of use to someone beside me.
The solution turns out to be very simple. in the do_GET(), do_POST, etc, you only need to add the following:
content = self.gzipencode(strcontent)
...your other headers, etc...
self.send_header("Content-length", str(len(str(content))))
self.send_header("Content-Encoding", "gzip")
self.end_headers()
self.wfile.write(content)
self.wfile.flush()
strcontent being your actual content (as in HTML, javascript or other HTML resources) and the gzipencode:
def gzipencode(self, content):
import StringIO
import gzip
out = StringIO.StringIO()
f = gzip.GzipFile(fileobj=out, mode='w', compresslevel=5)
f.write(content)
f.close()
return out.getvalue()
Since this was the top google result I figured I would post my simple modification to the script that got gzip to work.
As so many others, I've been using python -m SimpleHTTPServer for local testing as well. This is still the top result on google and while https://github.com/ksmith97/GzipSimpleHTTPServer is a nice solution, it enforces gzip even if not requested and there's no flag to enable/disable it.
I decided to write a tiny cli tool that supports this. It's go, so the regular install procedure is simply:
go get github.com/rhardih/serve
If you already have $GOPATH added to $PATH, that's all you need. Now you have serve as a command.
This was a feature request but rejected due to wanting to keep the simple http server simple: https://bugs.python.org/issue30576
The issue author eventually released a standalone version for Python 3: https://github.com/PierreQuentel/httpcompressionserver
Building on @velis answer above, here is how I do it. gZipping small data is not worth the time and can increase its size. Tested with Dalvik client.
def do_GET(self):
... get content
self.send_response(returnCode) # 200, 401, etc
...your other headers, etc...
if len(content) > 100: # don't bother compressing small data
if 'accept-encoding' in self.headers: # case insensitive
if 'gzip' in self.headers['accept-encoding']:
content = gzipencode(content) # gzipencode defined above in @velis answer
self.send_header('content-encoding', 'gzip')
self.send_header('content-length', len(content))
self.end_headers() # send a blank line
self.wfile.write(content)
From looking at SimpleHTTPServer's documentation, there is no way. However, I recommend lighttpd with the mod_compress module.
