django-bundles

django_bundles: Another Django media bundler

django_bundles is a media bundler for Django. It can be used to bundle groups of media files (e.g. CSS, JavaScript) into a single file with a hash in the filename (to play nicely with browser caching) whilst keeping the files separate during development.

There are ideas taken from a lot of the other media bundlers - none of them worked quite how I wanted and I fancied writing my own.

I think Django 1.4 is required, but possibly only because of the assignment tag decorator used.

IMPORTANT NOTE: 0.3.0 is not backwards compatible with 0.2.5

Features

• Pre and post processing of files (e.g. LessCSS, UglifyJS) - really easy to add others
• Could be used with script loaders either using the template tags for inline scripts or a DjangoTemplateProcessor to preprocess a JavaScript file
• Management command to bundle media
• Management command to lint files (e.g. using JSLint/JSHint)
• Flexible API that doesn't force you to work in a certain way

Usage

The main settings are USE_BUNDLES which is True/False to enable/disable bundling in the template (defaults to not settings.DEBUG), BUNDLES_VERSION_FILE which is where versions are stored (in a python file) and BUNDLES which looks like:

BUNDLES = (
    ('master_css', {
        'type': 'css',
        'files': (
            'css/*.css',
            'css/more/test3.css',
            'less/test.less',
        ),
    }),
    ('master_js', {
        'type': 'js',
        'files': (
            'js/*.js',
        )
    }),
    ('script_loader_example', {
        'type': 'js',
        'files': (
            'script_loader_example.js',
        ),
        'processors': (
            'django_bundles.processors.django_template.DjangoTemplateProcessor',
        )
    }),
)

All of the BUNDLES options can be found in django_bundles/core.py on the Bundle and BundleFile classes.

The {% render_bundle bundle_name %} template tag can then be used to render the HTML (e.g. script or link tag) in place. django_bundles/templates needs to be in your template directories list (or copy them in).

Other settings are (check out django_bundles/conf/default_settings.py):

• DEFAULT_PREPROCESSORS - dict of file type to list of processors (default is LessCSS for .less files)
• DEFAULT_POSTPROCESSORS - dict of bundle type to list of processors (default is UglifyJS for .js bundles)

Linting

If you define a BUNDLES_LINTING setting you can use the lint_bundles management command to lint your files. e.g.

BUNDLES_LINTING = {
    'js': {
        'command': '/path/to/jslint/bin/jslint.js {infile}',
        'default': True,
    },
}

It currently expects output like JSLint.

Things it doesn't do

• JavaScript tags are rendered in place in the template - there's no deferring them to the bottom of the page automatically
• Files aren't passed through preprocessors before being rendered in development mode - for LessCSS you have to include the LessCSS script tag (wrapped in {% if not settings.USE_BUNDLES %} so you don't use it in production)

staticfiles

I think it should be pretty simple to use this with staticfiles with clever use of files_url_root, files_root, bundle_url_root and bundle_file_root as long as collectstatic management command is run before create_bundles in the deployment process.