django-http-compression

Django middleware for compressing HTTP responses with Zstandard, Brotli, or Gzip.

For a bit of background, see the introductory blog post.

---

Work smarter and faster with my book Boost Your Django DX which covers many ways to improve your development experience.

---

Requirements

Python 3.9 to 3.14 supported.

Python 3.14+ required for Zstandard support (for compression.zstd).

Django 4.2 to 6.0 supported.

Installation

1. Install with pip:

   python -m pip install django-http-compression

To include Brotli support, add the brotli extra to pull in the brotli package:

python -m pip install 'django-http-compression[brotli]'

Brotli support is recommended only on Python 3.13 and below. From Python 3.14, the standard library includes Zstandard support, which is more performant than Brotli and has wide browser support.

2. Add django-http-compression to your INSTALLED_APPS:

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       ...,
       "django_http_compression",
       ...,
   ]

3. Add the middleware:

   MIDDLEWARE = [
       ...,
       "django_http_compression.middleware.HttpCompressionMiddleware",
       ...,
   ]

   The middleware should be above any that may modify your HTML, such as those of django-debug-toolbar or django-browser-reload. Remove any other middleware that will encode your responses, such as Django’s GZipMiddleware.

API

django_http_compression.middleware.HttpCompressionMiddleware

This middleware is similar to Django’s GZipMiddleware, but with extra coding support. It compresses responses with one of three codings, depending on what the client supports per the request’s Accept-Encoding header:

• Zstandard (zstd) - on Python 3.14+.
• Brotli (br) - if the brotli extra is installed.
• Gzip (gzip)

See the MDN content-encoding documentation for more details on these codings and their browser support.

Codings are prioritized based on any q factors sent by the client, for example accept-encoding: gzip;q=1.0, br;q=0.9 will prefer gzip over Brotli. After that, the middleware prefers the algorithms in the order of the above list, with Zstandard being the most preferred. This is because it’s the most performant, offering similar compression to Brotli in about half the time (per CloudFlare’s testing).

In practice, modern browsers do not send q factors and nearly all support Zstandard, so that will generally be selected (on Python 3.14+).

The middleware skips compression if any of the following are true:

• The content body is less than 200 bytes.
• The response already has a Content-Encoding header.
• The request does not have a supported accept-encoding header.
• Compression lengthens the response (for non-streaming responses).

If the response has an etag header, the etag is made weak to comply with RFC 9110 Section 8.8.1.

For the Gzip coding, the middleware mitigates some attacks using the Heal the Breach (HTB) technique, as used in Django’s GzipMiddleware. This fix adds a small number of random bytes to each response. To change the maximum number of random bytes added to responses, subclass the middleware and change the gzip_max_random_bytes attribute appropriately (default 100).

History

Django has supported Gzip compression since before version 1.0, from this commit (2005). Since then, compression on the web has evolved in Brotli (2013) and Zstandard (2015), with browsers adding support for both.

Brotli support on Python has always required a third-party package, making it a little inconvenient. But with Python 3.14 adding Zstandard support to the standard library, it’s much easier to support a modern, efficient compression algorithm.

This project exists as an evolution of Django’s GZipMiddleware, with the aim to provide a base for adding (at least) Zstandard support to Django itself. It pulls inspiration from the django-compression-middleware package.