Sooner or later, you're going to need to add a build step to your Django apps; whether it's because of Sass, Less, Coffee, AMD, or just to optimize your PNGs and JPEGs. There are a few popular ways to do some of these things with Django, but each has its own specific goals, and you can easily find your build requirements outside of their scope. django-staticbuilder takes a different approach by giving you a simple way to add a build step to your workflow, but has absolutely no opinion about what that build step should be, making it easy to take advantage of whatever build tools you want.
Check out the full documentation on readthedocs.
The heart of the staticbuilder build step is the buildstatic
management
command, and it is stupid simple. In fact, it only does two things: first, it
collects your static files into a build directory and, second, it runs some
shell commands. (Seriously, look at the source. It delegates most of its
work to Django's collectstatic
. And that's A Good Thing.)
To get started, add staticbuilder
to your INSTALLED_APPS
:
INSTALLED_APPS = (
...
'staticbuilder',
)
To specify the build directory, use the STATICBUILDER_BUILD_ROOT
setting:
STATICBUILDER_BUILD_ROOT = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'static_built')
To specify a list of shell commands to run with the STATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDS
setting:
STATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDS = [
'coffee -c /path/to/build_dir',
'uglifyjs /path/to/build_dir/a.js -c > /path/to/build_dir/a.js',
]
or (to keep things a little more tidy):
STATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDS = ['./bin/mybuildscript']
Finally, you'll need to add a special finder to your STATICFILES_FINDERS
list:
STATICFILES_FINDERS = (
'staticbuilder.finders.BuiltFileFinder',
# The default Django finders:
'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.FileSystemFinder',
'django.contrib.staticfiles.finders.AppDirectoriesFinder',
)
This finder is important—it's how Django finds the built versions of your files
when you run collectstatic
.
In order to ease development, this package includes a middleware class that will
automatically build your static files as part of the request-response cycle. In
order to use it, just add it to your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES
setting:
MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
...
'staticbuilder.middleware.BuildOnRequest',
)
Now, whenever you access a view that returns an HTML response, staticbuilder will check to see if your static files have changed since the last build. If they have, it will trigger a new build. This way, your static files will always be up-to-date.
In order to make sure your responses are delivered quickly when developing,
you'll probably want to have different STATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDS
when
DEBUG
is True
. (For example, you probably don't need to compress your
CSS and JS while developing.)
This middleware is automatically disabled when DEBUG
is False
, so it
won't run in production.