Node.js: Gzip compression?

Question

Am I wrong in finding that Node.js does no gzip compression and there are no modules out there to perform gzip compression? How can anyone use a web server that has no compression? What am I missing here? Should I try to—gasp—port the algorithm to JavaScript for server-side use?

Answer 1

Node v0.6.x has a stable zlib module in core now - there are some examples on how to use it server-side in the docs too.

An example (taken from the docs):

// server example
// Running a gzip operation on every request is quite expensive.
// It would be much more efficient to cache the compressed buffer.
var zlib = require('zlib');
var http = require('http');
var fs = require('fs');
http.createServer(function(request, response) {
  var raw = fs.createReadStream('index.html');
  var acceptEncoding = request.headers['accept-encoding'];
  if (!acceptEncoding) {
    acceptEncoding = '';
  }

  // Note: this is not a conformant accept-encoding parser.
  // See http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.3
  if (acceptEncoding.match(/\bdeflate\b/)) {
    response.writeHead(200, { 'content-encoding': 'deflate' });
    raw.pipe(zlib.createDeflate()).pipe(response);
  } else if (acceptEncoding.match(/\bgzip\b/)) {
    response.writeHead(200, { 'content-encoding': 'gzip' });
    raw.pipe(zlib.createGzip()).pipe(response);
  } else {
    response.writeHead(200, {});
    raw.pipe(response);
  }
}).listen(1337);