rails json response with gzip compression

Question

I have an api written in rails which on each request responds with a JSON response.

The response could be huge, so i need to compress the JSON response using gzip.

Wondering how to do this in rails controller?

I have added the line

use Rack::Deflater

in config.ru

Should I also be changing something in the line which renders JSON?

render :json => response.to_json()

Also, how do i check if the response is in gzip format or not..??

I did a curl request from terminal, I see only the normal plain JSON.

Answer 1

For the response to be in gzip format we don't have to change the render method call.
If the request has the header Accept-Encoding: gzip, Rails will automatically compress the JSON response using gzip.

If you don't want the user to send a request with preset header., you can add the header to the request manually in the controller before rendering the response:

request.env['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'] = 'gzip'
render :json => response.to_json()