You could also simply use Django’s GZip Middleware:

Either by enabling the middleware in settings.py by adding:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    "django.middleware.gzip.GZipMiddleware",
    ...
)

Or do it before you return a particular response. In your views.py, dec would be the handler for a certain url

from django.middleware.gzip import GZipMiddleware

gzip_middleware = GZipMiddleware()

 def dec(request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = func(request, *args, **kwargs)
        return gzip_middleware.process_response(request, response)
        return dec

NOTE: You should be certain you are not subject to side-channel attacks before using GZip middleware.

Warning

Security researchers recently revealed that when compression
techniques (including GZipMiddleware) are used on a website, the site
may become exposed to a number of possible attacks. Before using
GZipMiddleware on your site, you should consider very carefully
whether you are subject to these attacks. If you’re in any doubt about
whether you’re affected, you should avoid using GZipMiddleware. For
more details, see the the BREACH paper (PDF) and breachattack.com.

Also:

Changed in Django 1.10: In older versions, Django’s CSRF protection
mechanism was vulnerable to BREACH attacks when compression was used.
This is no longer the case, but you should still take care not to
compromise your own secrets this way.

If you’re gzipping single page, not for all pages, you can use gzip_page decorator instead of GzipMiddleware.

from django.views.decorators.gzip import gzip_page

@gzip_page
def viewFunc(request):
  return HttpResponse("hello"*100)

Reference here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/http/decorators/#module-django.views.decorators.gzip

For the sake of others finding this question and who are using nginx, this SO worked for me:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/41820704/4533488

Basically turning gzip on in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file did all the compression handling for me. On the client-side, most modern browsers automatically handle extracting (uncompressing) the data when receiving it – sweet!

Here is the nginx.conf file settings:

    http {

        #... other settings ...#

        ##
        # Gzip Settings
        ##

        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        gzip_vary on;
        gzip_proxied any;
        gzip_comp_level 6;
        gzip_buffers 16 8k;
        gzip_http_version 1.1;
        gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;
    }

If you need it for a single page and you are using class based views, use this:

gzip_middleware = GZipMiddleware()

class GZipMixin(object):

    def dispatch(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
        response = super(GZipMixin, self).dispatch(request, *args, **kwargs)
        return gzip_middleware.process_response(request, response)

Then in your actual view:

class MyView(GZipMixin, View):
    def get(self, request, *args, **kwargs):
         #return your response

If you compress your data with zlib, you have to set Content-Encoding to deflate, not gzip.

rendered_page =  zlib.compress(template.render(context).encode('utf-8'))

response = HttpResponse(rendered_page)
response['Content-Encoding'] = 'deflate'
response['Content-Length'] = len(rendered_page)
return response

Content-Encoding

(…)

deflate

Using the zlib structure (defined in RFC 1950) with the deflate compression algorithm (defined in RFC 1951).