Support transparent response body compression

[tanuck]

Hi,

Again, I don't know whether there's scope for this in fabio - but have you thought about applying compression to proxied responses?

Possibly supplying a list of mime types in the properties file that will be gzip'ed etc?

Cheers

[smancke]

I'have recently written a mime type aware gzip handler,
after reviewing some existing solutions out there:
https://github.com/smancke/handler/blob/master/gzip/gzip_handler.go

If you like, just copy over the code and tests to fabio.

[magiconair]

Shouldn't this work by just setting the Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate header? Can you explain a bit more what you're after?

[tanuck]

@magiconair no, i was focusing on apply compression to responses proxied by fabio - what @smancke has suggested with his gzip handler

Cheers

[magiconair]

@tanuck so you want fabio to inject the Accept-Encoding header into the outgoing request?

[tanuck]

no, just leave that to the browser/client - but if it's present, have the same sort of feature as nginx, to compress the response from the upstream service before sending it to the client and then setting the Content-Encoding header in the response.

[magiconair]

@tanuck Sorry, I don't get it. Isn't that exactly the behavior of the net/http library? The browser sets the Accept-Encoding header and fabio compresses the response sent back to the client? I'm sure I'm missing something here. Could you provide an example request/response from/to fabio and from/to upstream service?

[magiconair]

@tanuck I think I get it. You want some responses to be compressed independent of whether the browser has requested compression, i.e. text/css should always be compressed even if the browser did not send the Accept-Encoding header.

[tanuck]

@magiconair no not quite. So i'm trying to get a fabio setup that can replicate my current "nginx as a reverse proxy" configuration.

So right now I have an nginx service, proxying requests to various dockerized microservices. The microservices don't perform any gzip compression. Instead, we use the nginx gzip module. If the browser sends Accept-Encoding: gzip then nginx will compress the response from the upstream microservices and set Content-Encoding: gzip before returning the response to the browser. I hope that's more clear.

So my question is whether this can be replicated with fabio, whether responses from upstream services can be compressed returning the response to the client/browser.

The http.Handler that @smancke linked is pretty much what I mean, so some way to integrate that into fabio based on a config setting?

Cheers

[magiconair]

@tanuck ah, I think the penny finally dropped. I was under the impression that the Go std lib already does this but it looks like it doesn't. The DisableCompression applies only to the client AFAICT. In that case I'll add it. Shouldn't be a big issue.

[tanuck]

Awesome :) I'm happy to help out with the implementation if needed.

What do you think is the best way to configure this? In fabio.properties or as part of the route tags in consul etc?

[magiconair]

I'll let you know when I have a patch ready. For now this needs to be a global option since I don't have a way to express this on the routes yet.

[magiconair]

@smancke any objections if I incorporate your code with proper attribution? License is MIT.

[magiconair]

@smancke just read your first comment again where you're ok with this.

[smancke]

@magiconair Yes, please just take it.