How to create a simple node server that gzips static files

I was at this hour.

the first thing I did was follow this tutorial which had this code:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();

// New call to compress content
app.use(express.compress());    
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/public'));
app.listen(3333);

      

        
        
        
      

    

naturally the code is outdated .. and I got this error:

Error: Most middleware (like compress) is no longer bundled with Express and must be installed separately. Please see https://github.com/senchalabs/connect#middleware.

      

        
        
        
      

    

so I updated the code to:

var express = require('express');
var app = express();
var compression = require('compression')

app.use(compression());
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/_public' ));    

app.listen(3333);

      

        
        
        
      

    

which worked fine .. but I didn't see evidence of compression (how do I know?) by looking at the chrome-dev-tools answer headers:

it doesn't have a gzip header content-encoding

like the one given in the tutorial:

So, tried instead of zlib :

var express = require('express');
var app     = express();
var maxAge  = 31557600000;
var zlib = require('zlib');
app.use(express.static(__dirname + '/_public' ));

app.get('/*', function(req,res)
{
  res.sendFile(__dirname + '/_public/index.html').pipe(zlib.createGunzip()).pipe(output);
});

app.listen(3333);

      

        
        
        
      

    

but that didn't work either. And this time I was almost bald. Any help?

ps the docs compression says you can provide zlib options, but cannot provide any examples / explanations.

update: the question has been fully answered and marked as such (I hate moving target questions) .. but I can't help but ask: and so how can you check how much of your original payload has been truncated as a result of gzip compression? Since, naturally, the compression / decompression happens behind the scenes, and therefore such chrome tools will report the original file size on their network tab: