Not respecting STATIC_URL

[joshuajonah]

Ok, this has been brought up numerous times before and the answer is always to use Webpack's publicPath to configure the URL base. This seems wrong. Even your documentation is wrong saying that STATIC_URL is used.

Is integrating webpack into a DJANGO project not the entire point of this repo? Why do I want more configuration files when I could just append the STATIC_URL to the start when generating urls in render_bundle. If you don't want it to do that, then remove your STATIC_URL.

Bottom line, I think this package is making too many assumptions and decisions on the users behalf. For example, I have a large app that I'm trying to integrate right now. It has about 30 static media servers including random CDN providers. My STATIC_URL is dynamic based on connection locale. Webpack build does not know anything about this when building locally before deploy. If this package would just respect STATIC_URL the way every other Django integration does, this would just work.

I'm going to fork this package and use my hacked version, but I would SERIOUSLY recommend taking this into consideration.

[calocan]

This is confusing me too. The offending code seems to be in webpack_loader/loader.py:

    def get_chunk_url(self, chunk):
        public_path = chunk.get('publicPath')
        if public_path:
            return public_path

        relpath = '{0}{1}'.format(
            self.config['BUNDLE_DIR_NAME'], chunk['name']
        )
        return staticfiles_storage.url(relpath)

which cause both the BUNDLE_DIR_NAME and the STATIC_DIR to be ignored whenever publicPath is present in the chunk, which it always is, no? There's no comment on this code, so I can't tell what the intention is, but it means that my webpack bundle URL in my template code is always wrong. Django serves it from /[STATIC_DIR]/[BUNDLE_DIR_NAME]/[bundle_name].js but the template code just uses the publicPath and generates /[bundle)name].js, which is of course not found by Django.

So we either have a major misunderstanding or fundamental bug. I'm guessing it's the former, but I could use clarification.

Thanks!

[iMerica]

Is this new behavior? I have an app running a previous version of this library that works fine without specifying publicPath?

[k-funk]

Seems to not be new behavior, as i tested it with 0.5.0 and it behaved the same. I also found it confusing that STATIC_URL wasn't being used.

[carlos-avila]

I resorted to set webpack's publicPath to an empty string to test false at if public_path:

output: {
        path: path.resolve(__dirname, '../dist/assets'),
        filename: '[name].js',
        publicPath: ''
    },

I'm of the mind that Django's config should be the source of truth for a Django module.

[harrywhite4]

It does prevent having to lookup multiple files when using django's manifest storage though. So keeping that behaviour as an optional thing would be nice

[keikoro]

@carlos-avila Too bad this hack doesn't work if publicPath actually needs to be set.

[jabelone]

Just wanted to say I got here after trying to work out why my STATIC_URL and BUNDLE_DIR_NAME settings weren't doing anything.

I'm using vue-cli and added this option to my vue.config.js file which fixed it:

module.exports = {
  ...
  publicPath: "",
  ...
};

I don't think I'll need to use the publicPath setting but this is definitely unintuitive behaviour and would be great if it was fixed. :)

[rvlb]

Hi folks, closing this issue for now. It seems to have been fixed since the releases of version 1.0.0 on both django-webpack-loader and webpack-bundle-tracker.

I've tried to reproduce this issue on my side and got the code to behave as expected when using publicPath and when not using it (which would use STATIC_URL as a fallback). Our examples have the scenario where we don't set publicPath covered (webpack.config.js and settings.py).

Please feel free to comment on this issue to reopen it if you feel we should further investigate this.

[stefanbrand-rldatix]

If you want to use the django STATIC_URL for your bundle files in your template while at the same time still having publicPath set to something in your webpack config you can override the loader get_chunk_url method to ignore the publicPath.

Need to subclass the WebpackLoader class and add the LOADER_CLASS option to the config
https://github.com/django-webpack/django-webpack-loader#extra-settings

Remove this part of the method:

public_path = chunk_file.get('publicPath')
if public_path:
    return public_path

and end up with:

from webpack_loader.loader import WebpackLoader

class CustomWebpackLoader(WebpackLoader):
    def get_chunk_url(self, chunk_file):
        # Use os.path.normpath for Windows paths
        relpath = os.path.normpath(
            os.path.join(self.config['BUNDLE_DIR_NAME'], chunk_file['name'])
        )
        return staticfiles_storage.url(relpath)