Django Webpack Boilerplate

A sample Django project that uses Webpack to manage, bundle, and process static assets.

Prerequisites

• Node & NPM
• Python 2.7 or 3.6 (with Pip)

Dependencies

% npm install
% pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

% npm run build
% ./manage.py runserver

# Open in your browser
% open "http://localhost:8000"

Why?

There are a number of advantages to using something to manage and bundle static assets.

• minification (smaller JS/CSS files) results in faster downloads and faster parsing of your static files
• file combining (combining multiple JS/CSS files) results in faster downloads although this is less of an advantage with HTTP2
• dependency management - rather than copying bootstrap or jquery into your source tree, there's simply an entry in package.json
• caching - having few static asset bundles with unique hashes allows setting very long expiry headers which results in faster sites