Check GZip Encoding with curl

By  on  

Last week I detailed how I enabled gzip encoding on nginx servers, the same server software I use on this site.  Enabling gzip on your server exponentially improves the site load time, thus improving user experience and (hopefully) Google page ranks.  I implemented said strategy and used another website to check if the gzip encoding worked, but little did I know, you can use the curl utility check if the encoding update worked.  Here's how you can check if the gzip encoding worked:

curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" -I https://davidwalsh.name

After executing the shell command, you'll get a response that looks like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: nginx
Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 01:12:36 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 20
Connection: keep-alive
X-Pingback: https://davidwalsh.name/xmlrpc.php
Cache-Control: max-age=1, private, must-revalidate
Expires: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 01:12:37 GMT
X-Powered-By: PleskLin
MS-Author-Via: DAV
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip

From the above response, you can see that the page was served gzipped via the Content-Encoding: gzip header.  You can check individual files instead of pages to ensure they have been gzipped as well.  The amount of effort you put into gzipping your site is worth it -- imagine how fast it makes your site to the thousands and millions of visitors you have each day!

Recent Features

  • By
    Convert XML to JSON with JavaScript

    If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I've been working on a super top secret mobile application using Appcelerator Titanium.  The experience has been great:  using JavaScript to create easy to write, easy to test, native mobile apps has been fun.  My...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple News Scroller Using Dojo

    My journey into Dojo JavaScript has been exciting and I'm continuing to learn more as I port MooTools scripts to Dojo. My latest experiment is porting a simple new scroller from MooTools to Dojo. The code is very similar! The HTML The news items...

  • By
    Face Detection with jQuery

    I've always been intrigued by recognition software because I cannot imagine the logic that goes into all of the algorithms. Whether it's voice, face, or other types of detection, people look and sound so different, pictures are shot differently, and from different angles, I...

Discussion

  1. Spencer

    You can also use the --compressed flag.

  2. Another great tool is: http://checkgzipcompression.com/
    Same thing but a very pretty graphic output.

  3. Aravind

    You can also try this:

    curl -k --compressed -o mydata.txt "https://url"
    
  4. https://api.cryptomkt.com/v1/order"
       -H "X-MKT-APIKEY:  "
       -H "X-MKT-SIGNATURE:  "
       -H "X-MKT-TIMESTAMP:  "
       -X POST
    
  5. Wasin

    To be able to see “text” data from gzipped content use the following (as found here https://stackoverflow.com/a/18984239/571227)

    curl -sH 'Accept-encoding: gzip' http://example.com/ | gunzip -
  6. Chris

    This didn’t work for me. It worked for some sites, but not for others that I knew for sure, had gzip enabled. The problem is the -I option. It sends a HEAD request. Try this, it worked with all sites:

    curl -sD - -o /dev/null https://example.com
    

    https://stackoverflow.com/a/26644485/960857

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!