Package: django-staticbuilder
Building Static FilesSooner or later, you’re going to need to add a build step to your Django apps;
whether it’s because ofSass,Less,Coffee,AMD, or just to optimize your
PNGs and JPEGs. There are afewpopularways 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 onreadthedocs.The heart of the staticbuilder build step is thebuildstaticmanagement
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 atthe source. It delegates most of its
work to Django’scollectstatic. And that’s A Good Thing.)To get started, addstaticbuilderto yourINSTALLED_APPS:INSTALLED_APPS=(...'staticbuilder',)To specify the build directory, use theSTATICBUILDER_BUILD_ROOTsetting:STATICBUILDER_BUILD_ROOT=os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__),'static_built')To specify a list of shell commands to run with theSTATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDSsetting: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 yourSTATICFILES_FINDERSlist: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 runcollectstatic.DevelopmentIn 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 yourMIDDLEWARE_CLASSESsetting: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 differentSTATICBUILDER_BUILD_COMMANDSwhenDEBUGisTrue. (For example, you probably don’t need to compress your
CSS and JS while developing.)This middleware is automatically disabled whenDEBUGisFalse, so it
won’t run in production.Collecting Without BuildingThebuildstaticcommand is actually a two-step process: collecting static
files into a build directory, and running some shell commands. The first step is
actually another command:collectforbuild. This command may be run by itself
in the event that you want to do a different set of build steps than what you
have configured (during a deployment, for example).Thebuildstaticcommand accepts an optional--nocollectflag that will
skip thecollectforbuildstep altogether. Note that this meanscollectforbuildwill need to have been run at some point prior tobuildstatic--nocollect.