problem using html_minify in django

[chrisamow]

Hi, thank you for doing this project!

I am trying to manually minify a view in a django project, but I don't have it integrated to the middleware (other views are already taken care of and have a build process)
But I expected to be able to call html_minify on the output of a call to django.shortcuts.render.
Instead I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/django/core/handlers/exception.py", line 34, in inner
    response = get_response(request)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/debug_toolbar/middleware.py", line 67, in __call__
    panel.generate_stats(request, response)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python3.8/site-packages/debug_toolbar/panels/headers.py", line 53, in generate_stats
    self.response_headers = OrderedDict(sorted(response.items()))

Exception Type: AttributeError at /v/27/
Exception Value: 'str' object has no attribute 'items'

Maybe there is something in newer django? Or is there some intermediate step in this possibly unusal workflow?