Brotli support

[gauravdewan007]

Goal of this plugin is to Prepare compressed versions of assets to serve them with Content-Encoding. Currently it supports gzip but it can be expanded to support brotli compression (and maybe combine zopfli - which is there elsewhere in this git org).
Brotli is supported by all modern browsers now. This plugin could provide defaul option to use brotli with fallback to gzip.

[alexander-akait]

@gauravdewan007 PR welcome 👍

[robcresswell]

There is already a brotli plugin - perhaps we could use the code from there?

In terms of format I'd suggest defaulting to gzip and adding a config flag to upgrade to brotli, for compatibility reasons. Otherwise people using the compression plugin with older browsers would see their current workflow break.

[robcresswell]

This PR from 2016 is also relevant: #31

As you can see in the reference above, I've contacted the brotli plugin author to see if they'd have time; if not, I can adopt it, although there's going to be big delay time (I'm going on holiday for the next week or so, and have no idea how webpack plugins work, but happy to learn).

[alexander-akait]

@robcresswell i think it is out of scope this plugin, better create other plugin for this purpose.
@michael-ciniawsky what do you think?

[robcresswell]

It sounds a lot like the other repo is basically a clone of this one with a different compression lib, judging from the config and README.

[alexander-akait]

@robcresswell we can add option package (need better name) and use here https://github.com/webpack-contrib/compression-webpack-plugin/blob/master/src/index.js#L44 to load from need package, let's wait what says @michael-ciniawsky

[mynameiswhm]

i think it is out of scope this plugin, better create other plugin for this purpose.

@evilebottnawi oh whait, there is another plugin for this purpose already which is being discussed in this thread :)

@robcresswell the reason for not stuffing every single compression algorithm into one plugin is to not download/compile a lot of unnecessary compression dependencies if you only need gzip.
The only real problem that plugin for gzip compression is historically called compression-webpack-plugin, not gzip-webpack-plugin, which may be misleading for newcomers.

[robcresswell]

Yeah, that makes sense I suppose. Just seems a shame to maintain two very similar plugins separately.

[michael-ciniawsky]

Since most alternative compression algorithms require a native addon, compression-webpack-plugin will only support what is being provided by node (GZIP) itself to avoid possible cross platform issues. Therefore support for alternative algorithms in compression-webpack-plugin is not planned atm.