[Fixed]-Compress JSON payload in Django for both request from client and response from server (REST API).

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From the client-side different tools may have done it differently. A simple implementation for a python-requests based client is done in this post.

But as for the decompression, I think it is better to be done at webserver level, just the same as what you did for response compression. It seems that there is no built-in configuration for Nginx but somebody has done sort of Lua to do the decompression before passing the request to the upstream.

Another – may be less efficient – solution would be to do the decompression in the very first Django middleware like the following:

import gzip


class SimpleMiddleware:
    def __init__(self, get_response):
       self.get_response = get_response

    def __call__(self, request):

        # check the headers if you are writing a versatile API
        # decompress the request body
        request._body = gzip.decompress(request.body)
        # fill the request stream in case you're using something like django-rest-framework
        request._stream = BytesIO(request.body)

        response = self.get_response(request)

        return response

Also, you have to configure your middleware as the very first middleware:

# in Django settings

MIDDLEWARE = [
    'python path to our new custom middleware',
    'django.middleware.security.SecurityMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.clickjacking.XFrameOptionsMiddleware',
]

Here are the references:

  1. Stackoverflow post on how to send gzipped reqeusts,
  2. Python 3 gzip documentation,
  3. Server fault thread on request body decompression,
  4. Django middleware reference.
👤Ali Asgari

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