superstatic

Improved production deployment of static files in Django.

NOTE: This document assumes familiarity with Django's django.contrib.staticfiles app.

Background

The standard Django collectstatic command gathers all files it finds under all apps' static dirs, plus any STATICFILES_DIRS specified in settings.py.

However you may not want to deploy all the files you use during development. For example, if you compile several JavaScript source files into a single, minimized file for deployment, you probably don't want to deploy the original source files, as they will be visible on the web to anyone who knows where to look.

The collectstatic command does have an --ignore flag, with which you can specify glob patterns of files that should not be collected. You can use this flag for finer-grained control over which files get deployed. However, you may not have the option to modify the collectstatic invocation used during deployment. In particular, Heroku invokes collectstatic for you, and that invocation's arguments cannot be configured.

Solution

The superstatic app provides an enhanced collectstatic command, which can read ignore patterns from a file, and apply them without requiring any extra command-line arguments.

To use this in your Django project:

• Install superstatic, either with pip or by adding it to your requirements.txt.
• Add materiality.superstatic to your INSTALLED_APPS. Make sure to add it before django.contrib.staticfiles.
• Add SUPERSTATIC_IGNORE_FILE = 'path/to/ignore_patterns_file' to your settings.py. That file should contain glob patterns, one per line, as if passed to the --ignore flag. Blank lines and comment lines (beginning with #) are ignored.