How to enable HTTP loopback connections

To PUT data to the server compressed you must compress the request body and set the Content-Encoding: gzip header. The header itself must be uncompressed. It's documented in mod_deflate:

The mod_deflate module also provides a filter for decompressing a gzip compressed request body. In order to activate this feature you have to insert the DEFLATE filter into the input filter chain using SetInputFilter or AddInputFilter.

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Now if a request contains a Content-Encoding: gzip header, the body will be automatically decompressed. Few browsers have the ability to gzip request bodies. However, some special applications actually do support request compression, for instance some WebDAV clients.

And an article describing it is here:

So how do you do it? Here is a blurb, again from the mod_deflate source code: only work on main request/no subrequests. This means that the whole body of the request must be gzip compressed if we chose to use this, it is not possible to compress only the part containing the file for example in a multipart request.

Separately, a browser can request server response content to be compressed by setting Accept-Encoding header as per here:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.http-compression.com
Accept-Encoding: gzip
User-Agent: Firefox/1.0

This will return compressed data to the browser.

Technically ::2, ::3 etc. are part of ::0.0.0.0/96, the "ipv4 compatible ipv6 address" range. It's deprecated, but you probably don't want to use that range.

For a lab environment, use unique local addressing. Go to https://www.ultratools.com/tools/rangeGenerator and generate yourself a prefix. Then you can pick whatever addresses you want out of that prefix, and assign them to the loopback interface.