Minified storage of Django static files

This is a dead simple extension of Django's ManifestStaticFilesStorage aimed at supporting a workflow where main asset management is handled outside Django but Django still needs to support the production deployment. It extends the ManifestStaticFilesStorage from 1.7 to provide the following features on top

• Automatic minification of js/css files
• Automatic generation of .gz version for all assets

In the intended usecase grunt,brunch,gulp or similiar frontend tool is used to manage assets in development. This extension then provides the django specific logic needed for sane production deployment i.e. it generates assets which are minified and contains hashes in the filename to allow a "cache forever" strategy. Additionally .gz files are generated to allow for serving such to supporting clients.

All minification and compression happens at deployment time (when calling collectstatic) so to support high-throughput cases where generation for each request is impractical.

Design philosophy

• Small code base based mainly on existing Django functionality
• No non-python dependencies to simplify production deployment

Requirements

• Django 1.7 or later
• Slimit (unless other js minification engine is used)
• csscompressor (unless other css minification engine is used)
• Python zlib (for gzipping generation)

Usage

Install from pip

pip install django_minifiedstorage

Insert as STATICFILES_STORAGE in django settings

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'minifiedstorage.storages.MinifiedManifestStaticFilesStorage'

Run python manage.py collectstatic with DEBUG=False and use the static templatetag to include your assets

Configuration

Minification tools

Minifying behaviour can be controlled through the MINIFIED_COMPRESSORS setting. The setting takes a dict where the key is a regex to match against asset filenames and the value is a minification function which takes a single string argument and returns the minified version of this string string, i.e.

def minify_function(string)
	...minify logic...
	return minified_string

The default setting is

MINIFIED_COMPRESSORS = settings.get('MINIFIED_COMPRESSORS',{
    r'\.js$': 'minifiedstorage.compressors.minify_js',
    r'\.css$': 'minifiedstorage.compressors.minify_css'
})

where minifiy_js and minify_css is wrappers around Slimit and csscompressor .

Gzip compression

Generation of gzipped assets can be turned off by setting MINIFIED_GZIP=False