Question

automatic http content compression

Posted on February 28, 2025
App Platform Fast API
Asked by leatnova

I have an API running on the DO app platform, which uses FastAPI and uvicorn. Both of these tools are not configured to compress the API responses and there is no compression during development. But if I look at the released version on DO, the replies got the HTTP header: “content-encoding: br”. Who adds this compression or where is it documented? Its nice but confusing.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• March 1, 2025

Hi there,

I believe that the DigitalOcean App Platform uses Cloudflare as part of its infrastructure, and as far as I know Cloudflare automatically applies Brotli or Gzip compression to responses when supported by the client.

That’s why you see content-encoding: br in production but not in local development.

If you want to verify this behavior, you can check the server and cf-cache-status headers in your API response. You can also read more about Cloudflare’s automatic compression here: 👉 Cloudflare Compression

- Bobby