httpcompressionserver

Extends the standard library module http.server with support of HTTP compression.

When a request sent by the client includes an Accept-Encoding header, which is the case for all modern browsers, the server handles the value (eg "gzip" or "deflate") and tries to compress the response body with the requested algorithm.

Class HTTPCompressionRequestHandler extends SimpleHTTPRequestHandler with 2 additional attributes:

• compressed_types: the list of mimetypes that will be returned compressed by the server. By default, it is set to a list of commonly compressed types.
• compressions: a mapping between an Accept-Encoding value and a generator that produces compressed data.

Chunked Transfer Encoding is used to send the compressed response, except when the compressed data size is small.

Installation

pip install httpcompressionserver

Usage

From the command line:

python -m httpcompressionserver [-h] [--bind ADDRESS] [port]

positional arguments:
  port                  Specify alternate port [default: 8000]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --bind ADDRESS, -b ADDRESS
                        Specify alternate bind address [default: all
                        interfaces]

In a script:

import httpcompressionserver

httpcompressionserver.test()

Function test() is defined in http.server and takes optional arguments:

test(port=8000, bind='')

Customising

A subclass of HTTPCompressionServer can override compressed_types to another list of mimetypes to compress, and compressions to support other compression algorithms.

For instance, to add support for the non-standard bzip2 encoding:

import bz2
from httpcompressionserver import HTTPCompressionRequestHandler, test

# Generator for bzip2 compression encoding.
def _bzip2_producer(fileobj):
    bufsize = 2 << 17
    producer = bz2.BZ2Compressor()
    with fileobj:
        while True:
            buf = fileobj.read(bufsize)
            if not buf: # end of file
                yield producer.flush()
                return
            yield producer.compress(buf)


class BZ2Handler(HTTPCompressionRequestHandler):

    compressions = HTTPCompressionRequestHandler.compressions.copy()
    compressions.update(bzip2=_bzip2_producer)

test(HandlerClass=BZ2Handler)