Skip to main content

Django: compressing CSS/JS files with django-compressor

There are 2 main usual tasks with web project's deployment and about .css and .js files.
First one - size minimization. But there are lot's of utilities helping you to compress CSS files. Delete unused spaces, comments and so on... Second one - Version control. For e. g. When you've updated the script on your deployment server, but user's browser uses old one until user manually hits 'Refresh'.
That's where Static files compressor comes in to mind.

Upon selecting among available one's found top "google" results:
- django-compress
- django-compressor
- webassets

Project uses 'django.contrib.staticfiles', so django-compress was not compatible... It does not support Django's static files gently. Webassets s a good lib. but project has a huge amount of different static. Maybe it's ok for e small project, but when you need to specify/change a 100's javascript in python module for certain templates... Nothing good comes in mind. And imho TEMPLATES... That's where thing's like those should live.

So Django-compressor was chosen using those criteria. And, to mention, project is actively developed, supported and documented. Anyway adding it to your django project is quite simple, as most good apps.

What it does, it turns this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}public/js/jquery-1.4.1.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}banners/js/jquery.cycle.all.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ MEDIA_URL }}js/gb/greybox.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
jQuery.browser.msie6 = jQuery.browser.msie && parseInt(jQuery.browser.version) == 6 && !window["XMLHttpRequest"];

if (!jQuery.browser.msie6) {
 $(document).ready(function(){
   $("div#body_wrapper").wrap('<div id="body_wrapper_shadow_right"><div id="body_wrapper_shadow_left">'+
     '</div></div>');
 });
</script>

Into this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/static/CACHE/js/8dd1a2872443.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

The install is quite simple and you need to follow this manual.
Then configure it. Basically you hava all set for it to function. Except for me having a bit wired way of storing static files. I had to remap default COMPRESS_ROOT and COMPRESS_URL variables. It's quite easily done in settings.py. And it has lot's of other settings, that I did not require.

Anyhow this is it. Now you can wrap all of your code with handy templatetags that will do all the work for you. it may look somehow like this:

{% load compress %}

{% compress css %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/one.css" type="text/css" charset="utf-8">
<style type="text/css">p { border:5px solid green;}</style>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/static/css/two.css" type="text/css" charset="utf-8">
{% endcompress %}

or for .js files:

{% load compress %}

{% compress js %}
<script src="/static/js/one.js" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">obj.value = "value";</script>
{% endcompress %}


It will generate a custom .js/.css files with all of your compressed static at one file in your media/static dir that can be cashed. They will have links, like "/media/CACHE/css/105dsb963311.css"and put your newly generated script/style there. 

This is it. Use this in your projects. It economies your server's time/traffic and helps you to update scripts at all user's clients in their browsers when you deploy a new version.

Liked/used/hated/disliked/have a better way? Please leave a comment here about what and/or how you did this/suggest me to do this?

Comments

  1. Your links to the manual page should be changed to http://django-compressor.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ (underscore should be hyphen).

    There seems to be some inconsistency between underscore/hyphen using for django compressor, it's still underscore on pip/github! :S

    Thanks for the article though, you helped make up my mind about which to go for :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pretty git Log

SO you dislike git log output in console like me and do not use it... Because it looks like so: How about this one? It's quite easy... Just type: git log - - graph - - pretty = format : '%Cred%h%Creset -%C ( yellow ) %d%Creset %s %Cgreen ( %cr) %C ( bold blue ) <%an>%Creset' - - abbrev - commit - - It may be hard to enter such an easy command every time. Let's make an alias instead... Copypaste this to your terminal: git config --global alias.lg "log --color --graph --pretty=format:'%Cred%h%Creset -%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr) %C(bold blue)<%an>%Creset' --abbrev-commit --" And use simple command to see this pretty log instead: git lg Now in case you want to see lines that changed use: git lg - p In order for this command to work remove  the -- from the end of the alias. May the code be with you! NOTE: this article is a rewritten copy of  http://coderwall.com/p/euwpig?i=3&p=1&t=git   and have b...

Django: Resetting Passwords (with internal tools)

I have had a task recently. It was about adding a forms/mechanism for resetting a password in our Django based project. We have had our own registration system ongoing... It's a corporate sector project. So you can not go and register yourself. Admins (probably via LDAP sync) will register your email/login in system. So you have to go there and only set yourself a password. For security reasons you can not register. One word. First I've tried to find standart decision. From reviewed by me were: django-registration and django password-reset . These are nice tools to install and give it a go. But I've needed a more complex decision. And the idea was that own bicycle is always better. So I've thought of django admin and that it has all the things you need to do this yourself in no time. (Actually it's django.contrib.auth part of django, but used out of the box in Admin UI) You can find views you need for this in there. they are: password_reset password_reset_...

Vagrant error: * Unknown configuration section 'hostmanager'.

Sometimes you get a vagrant environment or boilerplate with a Vagrantfile config in there and do a vagrant up command. And see some errors. like this: There are errors in the configuration of this machine . Please fix the following errors and try again : Vagrant: * Unknown configuration section 'hostmanager'. To fix this one needs: $ vagrant plugin install vagrant - hostmanager Installing the ' vagrant-hostmanager ' plugin . This can take a few minutes . . . Fetching : vagrant - hostmanager - 1.8 .6 . gem ( 100 % ) Installed the plugin ' vagrant-hostmanager (1.8.6) ' ! So command to fix this as follows: vagrant plugin install vagrant-hostmanager