Tag: connect

While working on a couchapp recently I found out quite interesting fact. CouchDB doesn’t support   the gzip/deflate HTTP responses. And with a view that’s several MB, on a slow connection it was a lot pain using the app.

My first thought was, no problem, my CouchDB is behind nginx anyway, lets just turn on gzip compression in nginx. And while that was super simple to do, it yielded an undesired effect. The responses were now compressed, but nginx strips off Etags headers, and there is no way around it. Without the Etag queries always return full responses, even if the data hasn’t been modified. With them, a short 304 reponse is sent when there is no change.

Unhappy with nginx approach to way too strict HTTP, I decided to write my own compressing proxy. Fortunately thats super simple with nodejs/iojs. Its just a matter of gluing few modules together 🙂

First install the modules:

npm install http-proxy connect compression morgan

Then save this as proxy.js in the same directory:

var	http = require('http'),
		connect = require('connect'),
		compression = require('compression'),
		morgan = require('morgan'),
		httpProxy = require('http-proxy');

var port = 8012;

var proxy = httpProxy.createProxyServer({
	target: 'http://localhost:5984/'
});

var app = connect();

// Log the requests, useful for debugging
app.use(morgan('combined'));

app.use(compression());
app.use(
	function(req, res) {
		proxy.web(req, res);
	}
).listen(port);

console.log('proxy  started  on port ' +  port);

And voila , now run:

node proxy.js

And you have gzipped responses from CouchDB on port 8012.