BIG-IP Report
Update regarding Brotli support
If you do not know what Brotli is you can look at it as a much more efficient way to compress css, json and javascript files. It's a bit slower to compress but on the upshot it's much smaller and using it will speed up the BigIPReport application delivery significantly. The last week we've been focusing on making it easier for people to use Brotli with their BigIPReport installations by creating server templates for different web server vendors.
For those with larger BigIPReport installations I'd really really recommend checking this out. It pretty easy and the gain is high.
Before you start though, please note that the report must run over HTTPS for Brotli to be supported!
Docker/Kubernetes
I've now fixed the nginx configuration in the frontend containers. Pull bigipreport/frontend:v5.6.8 or latest to use the fix. Make sure to empty your cache if you use the tag :latest (not recommended to use this tag btw).
F5 iRules
For those serving BigIPReport via an F5 you can grab an iRule which will do the necessary rewrites to use Brotli. The iRule can be found here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/ServeBrotliViaF5/serve-brotli.tcl
IIS
Still stuck with an old Windows installation? First I'd recommend moving to a Linux based installation instead. If this is not possible Tim has been so kind as to share his IIS web.config here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/iis/web.config
Apache
For those that uses Apache our superstar Tim has yet again delivered. You can find the Apache config here:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport/blob/master/other/apache/brotli.conf
Nginx
If you prefer to run your own Nginx server you can check out the file used in the frontend container:
https://github.com/net-utilities/BigIPReport-Docker/blob/master/frontend/default.conf
Double checking that it works
Using curl this is easy enough. Just run the command below and look for "content-encoding: br":
curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: br" https://bigipreport.xip.se/json/pools.json
HTTP/2 200
server: istio-envoy
date: Wed, 11 May 2022 20:59:36 GMT
content-type: application/json
content-length: 709
last-modified: Wed, 11 May 2022 20:58:19 GMT
etag: "627c236b-2c5"
content-encoding: br
vary: Accept-Encoding
accept-ranges: bytes
x-envoy-upstream-service-time: 0
You can also double check this by opening up the developer tools of Chrome, head over to the Network tab and refresh your BigIPReport page. If Brotli is used as it should you should see "content-encoding: br" in the response headers. See the screenshot below:
If you run into trouble, please go ahead and head over to our Discord channel:
https://discord.gg/fwEaT7Rf
Have a good one!