Flask-Compress for compression - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Flask-Compress for compression

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Flask web app that serves a text message. To improve performance, you want to compress the responses so they load faster for users.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to add Flask-Compress to your Flask app to automatically compress HTTP responses.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a basic Flask app with one route

Add Flask-Compress extension to the app

Configure Flask-Compress with a compression level

Serve compressed responses from the Flask app

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Compressing HTTP responses reduces data size sent to users, improving load times and saving bandwidth.

💼 Career

Web developers often use Flask-Compress or similar tools to optimize web app performance and user experience.

1

Create a basic Flask app

Create a Flask app by importing Flask from flask and instantiate it as app. Then create a route / that returns the string 'Hello, Flask!'.

Flask

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Start by importing Flask and creating an app instance. Then define a route '/' with a function that returns a simple string.

2

Add Flask-Compress extension

Import Compress from flask_compress and create a Compress object called compress. Initialize it with the Flask app app.

Flask

from flask import Flask

app = Flask(__name__)

# Import Compress and initialize it with app
# Your code here

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Flask!'

Need a hint?

Import Compress, create an instance, and call init_app(app) to enable compression.

3

Configure compression level

Set the Flask app config key COMPRESS_LEVEL to 6 to specify the compression level.

Flask

from flask import Flask
from flask_compress import Compress

app = Flask(__name__)
# Set compression level to 6
# Your code here
compress = Compress()
compress.init_app(app)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Flask!'

Need a hint?

Use app.config['COMPRESS_LEVEL'] = 6 to set compression level before initializing Compress.

4

Run the Flask app

Add the code to run the Flask app with app.run() inside the if __name__ == '__main__': block.

Flask

from flask import Flask
from flask_compress import Compress

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config['COMPRESS_LEVEL'] = 6
compress = Compress()
compress.init_app(app)

@app.route('/')
def home():
    return 'Hello, Flask!'

# Add code to run the app
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the standard Python block if __name__ == '__main__': to run app.run().