There appears to be no API to enable gzip compression of requests

[the80srobot]

I can't find a way to get ureq to compress requests with gzip.

ureq::post offers no API to do so, and there are no corresponding options in the ConfigBuilder and no examples in documentation.

[algesten]

Hi @the80srobot and welcome to ureq!

You're right. This is something we should make a priority to add back.

[algesten]

I worked through this quite far making it align with ureq2 function where it picked up on request headers to transform the request body. However as I was getting near completion, I'm getting cold feet.

Introducing behavioral changes on request header presence is a breaking change.

If we are to support this (and it's a big if), we need to make an API with config for the request body.

[algesten]

For now I label this as wontfix, but I leave the issue to see if more people want this.

[jsha]

FWIW I agree with wontfix. I ran into this a while ago too, and after some research concluded that it's quite uncommon for servers to automatically handle compressed POST bodies.

It makes sense for clients to automatically ask for and decompress response bodies, because many servers offer this and it's a "free" performance win that doesn't require much from the user. Also, implementing it as a user requires a decent amount of conditional code to handle different cases (compressed or not).

But sending compressed POST bodies as a user composes nicely and doesn't require a lot of extra logic: send the bytes through a compression library before passing to ureq; set the appropriate Content-Encoding header manually.

Note that you need some advance knowledge that the server will accept gzip'ed requests. There's some discussion of that in https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7694.html, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Client-Initiated Content-Encoding" which specifies that a server can reply with 415 (Unsupported Media Type) and Accept-Encoding listing the encodings it accepts. But by that time the request has already been sent off, so it's a little wasteful.