How to gzip JavaScript and CSS assets in Sails.js?

Question

I am trying to enable gzip compression for my assets in a Sails.js (Node) application. When launching the app in production environment, all the assets in assets/linker/js and assets/linker/styles are concatenated, minified, uglified successfully (as specified in the Gruntfile). The following output files are generated:

.tmp/
  public/
    min/
      production.js
      production.css

I would like to add gzip compression as well, therefore i have installed grunt-contrib-compress and added the compress task to the Gruntfile. I can get the following results with successfully gzipped files.

.tmp/
  public/
    min/
      production.js
      production.js.gz
      production.css
      production.css.gz

My problem is now that the server needs to respond with the gzipped files (when the client accepts the encoding) instead of the normal ones and I can't find a way to do this. Maybe policies are the sails-way to do something like this? Or is there another way to use express middleware?

If it helps, this is the current sails-linker task which inserts the javascript production.js file into the markup:

  ...

  prodJs: {
    options: {
      startTag: '<!--SCRIPTS-->',
      endTag: '<!--SCRIPTS END-->',
      fileTmpl: '<script src="%s"></script>',
      appRoot: '.tmp/public'
    },
    files: {
      '.tmp/public/**/*.html': ['.tmp/public/min/production.js'],
      'views/**/*.html': ['.tmp/public/min/production.js'],
      'views/**/*.ejs': ['.tmp/public/min/production.js']
    }
  },

  ...

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

i recommend you to read this github issue ( Enable Express compression in Sails.js by default ), and this stackoverflow answer ( Add express middleware for param validations ) for further details and sailsjs framework way.

Hope this help, and don't hesitate to ask more details if you encounter some difficulties.