django-staticbuilder 0.2

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 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.