Python WhiteNoise not gzip compressing in Flask application

I found the solution, after a few tries. It seems that the WhiteNoise documentation is a little bit outdated and doesn't mention everything.

I changed the line from:

app.wsgi_app = WhiteNoise(app.wsgi_app, root='static/')

to:

app.wsgi_app = WhiteNoise(app.wsgi_app, root=os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'static'), prefix='static/')

First of all, the prefixparameter is required (not mentioned in the documentation) and furthermore the Flask app did not know how to handle the 'static/' path therefore an absolute path has to be provided.

You should use the command line utility comes with WhiteNoise to do the compression yourself.

Quote

WhiteNoise comes with a command line utility which will generate compressed versions of your files for you.

$ python -m whitenoise.compress --helpusage: compress.py [-h] [-q] [--no-gzip] [--no-brotli]                   root [extensions [extensions ...]]Search for all files inside <root> *not* matching <extensions> and producecompressed versions with '.gz' and '.br' suffixes (as long as this results ina smaller file)positional arguments:  root         Path root from which to search for files  extensions   File extensions to exclude from compression (default: jpg,               jpeg, png, gif, webp, zip, gz, tgz, bz2, tbz, swf, flv, woff,               woff2)optional arguments:  -h, --help   show this help message and exit  -q, --quiet  Don't produce log output  --no-gzip    Don't produce gzip '.gz' files  --no-brotli  Don't produce brotli '.br' files

You can either run this during development and commit your compressed files to your repository, or you can run this as part of your build and deploy processes.