django-mediacat is a small app with only one view, which lets you retrieve
several media files from the server with only one HTTP request.
Usually, designers and developers like to spread CSS and JavaScript files out
into several files on the web server, and then request only the necessary
files for each web page. Whilst this approach is more modular, and hence
prevents the downloading of unnecessary files, the fragmentation also incurs a
significant performance hit on the web server, as each part represents the
overhead of a full HTTP request.
What django-mediacat does is allow you to set up several ‘aliases’; short
names for media files on the web server. These can then be queried from one
URL, and django-mediacat will concatenate all requested files into one,
eliminating the overhead of multiple HTTP requests. Because JavaScript and CSS
don’t use namespaces, this concatenation is safe (but some wizards might write
code that proves otherwise, so always make sure).
First, add 'mediacat' to your INSTALLED_APPS list in your project’s
settings.py. Then, add to your project a URLconf directive to the
‘mediacat.views.cat’ view, with any URL you wish, like so:
You also need to set up the Django admin site on your project, in order to add
aliases. I won’t go into it here, just consult
the Django docs for more information.
The basic concept at the core of concatenating files is the alias. Each
alias represents a single file on the filesystem. Multiple aliases can point
to one file. Each alias may also be a member of a group, which may be the
child of another group. The canonical name of an alias is composed of a
period-separated list of the name of the alias, the name of its group, and the
name of that group’s parent, and so on.
Suppose, for example, there was a group called js, with a subgroup called
mootools, which has an alias called core. The canonical name of this alias
would, therefore, be core.mootools.js. This method of naming produces files
with clear and concise names.
The django-mediacat admin site is very self-explanatory; just create your
groups, attach to those groups your aliases, and you’re done.
In order to concatenate a set of aliases into one file, simply request the URL
you have pointed to the mediacat.views.cat view, adding GET keys with no
value (i.e. instead of key1=value1&key2=value2, just use key1&key2) to the
query string, like this:
As you can see, each GET parameter represents one media alias. This will
return the concatenation of the three files represented by the aliases
core.mootools.js, fx.mootools.js and jquery.js, in the order they were
provided.
This app is fully compatible with Django’s other middleware (django-mediacat
has no middleware itself), and a significant effort has been made to cache the
data on the client-side, using the ETags and Last-Modified HTTP headers.
This means that, again, the number of HTTP requests from each client will be
minimized.
When you change a media file on disk, it is recommendable to invalidate the
app’s caches. This can be done merely by calling the save() method with no
arguments on each model instance; a handy management command has been provided
to help do this. To invalidate django-mediacat’s caches, issue the following
command at the terminal:
$ python manage.py mediaclean
This will invalidate all of django-mediacat’s caches (which may take a while).
If, however, you’d prefer to refresh just one file (i.e. one you’ve made
changes to), you can do the following:
This will invalidate only the aliases given.
My name is Zachary Voase, and you can get to my personal home page (which has
links to all my other pages) here.