NGINX Gulp
This is a guide for Front-End Developers (FEDs) working on Oscar projects, not on Oscar itself. It is written with Tangent's FED team in mind but should be more generally useful for anyone trying to customise Oscar and looking for the right approach.
Oscar ships with a set of HTML templates and a collection of static files (e.g. images and Javascript). Oscar's default CSS is generated from SASS files.
Oscar's default templates use the mark-up conventions from the Bootstrap project. Classes for styling should be separate from classes used for Javascript. The latter must be prefixed with js-
, and using data attributes is often preferable.
The frontend and dashboard are intentionally kept separate. They incidentally both use Bootstrap and Font Awesome, but may be updated individually.
For the frontend, styles.scss
imports Bootstrap and Font Awesome SASS stylesheets, and ties them together with Oscar-specific styling.
For the dashboard, dashboard.scss
also imports Bootstrap and Font Awesome SASS stylesheets, and adds Oscar-specific customisations.
CSS files served to the browser are compiled from their SASS sources. For local development, npm run watch
will watch for local changes to SASS files and automatically rebuild the compiled CSS.
Use the command make assets
to compile assets manually.
Oscar uses Javascript for progressive enhancements. This guide used to document exact versions, but quickly became outdated. It is recommended to inspect layout.html
and dashboard/layout.html
for what is currently included.
Oscar ships with a complete set of templates (in oscar/templates
). These will be available to an Oscar project but can be overridden or modified.
The templates use Bootstrap conventions for class names and mark-up.
There is a separate recipe on how to do this.
Oscar's static files are stored in oscar/static
. When a Django site is deployed, the collectstatic
command is run which collects static files from all installed apps and puts them in a single location (called the STATIC_ROOT
). It is common for a separate HTTP server (like NGINX) to be used to serve these files, setting its document root to STATIC_ROOT
.
For an individual project, you may want to override Oscar's static files. The best way to do this is to have a statics folder within your project and to add it to the STATICFILES_DIRS
setting. Then, any files which match the same path as files in Oscar will be served from your local statics folder instead. For instance, if you want to use a local version of oscar/css/styles.css
, your could create a file:
yourproject/
static/
oscar/
css/
styles.css
and this would override Oscar's equivalent file.
To make things easier, Oscar ships with a management command for creating a copy of all of its static files. This breaks the link with Oscar's static files and means everything is within the control of the project. Run it as follows:
# with default "target_path" of "static"
./manage.py oscar_fork_statics
or
# with custom "target_path" ./manage.py oscar_fork_statics /path/to/static/directory/
This is the recommended approach for non-trivial projects.
Another option is simply to ignore all of Oscar's CSS and write your own from scratch. To do this, you simply need to adjust the layout templates to include your own CSS instead of Oscar's. For instance, you might override oscar/layout.html
and replace the styles
block:
# project/oscar/layout.html
{% extends "oscar/layout.html" %}
{% load static %}
{% block styles %}
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{% static 'myproject/styles.css' %}" />
{% endblock %}