Body Compression Plugin

Body Compression Plugin compresses response bodies to reduce bandwidth usage and improve performance for clients that support compression.

Import

Depending on your adapter, import the corresponding plugin:

import { BodyCompressionHandlerPlugin } from '@orpc/server/node'
import { BodyCompressionHandlerPlugin } from '@orpc/server/fetch'

Setup

Add the plugin to your handler:

const handler = new RPCHandler(router, {
  plugins: [
    new BodyCompressionHandlerPlugin(),
  ],
})

INFO

The handler can be any supported oRPC handler, such as RPCHandler, OpenAPIHandler, or a custom one.

Batch and Event Stream Responses

Event stream responses are never compressed: the web CompressionStream API cannot flush between chunks, so early events would sit in the compressor buffer until the stream ends, defeating streaming semantics.

Batch requests (identified by the orpc-batch header) with an application/octet-stream body are compressed by the fetch adapter when the runtime exposes the Node.js zlib and stream builtins via process.getBuiltinModule (Node.js ≥ 22.3, Bun, and compatible runtimes): a flush-per-message zlib stream is used instead of CompressionStream, so each response in a streaming batch is delivered to the client as soon as it is ready — compressed. In runtimes without these builtins, such batch responses stay uncompressed.

Learn More

For implementation details, see the fetch adapter source code and the node adapter source code.