python manage.py media –deploy=production
- or -
python manage.py media –deploy=beta

Currenly my deployment is built around lftp, which syncs all the assets to the server via FTP. But this is configuable in settings.py:

MEDIA_DEPLOY_COMMANDS = {
‘production’: ‘lftp …’,
‘beta’: ‘lftp …’,
}

I have not yet automated deploying of the app itself, but when I do, then pushing to production will be just two management commands… I will probably end up using fab for that.

I do agree with the others concerning re-inventing the wheel, but for me it was easier to write what I needed than to piece together a solution from various parts then fix all the parts for my requirements. I did not open source my code because I did not want to pollute the Django ecosystem with another wheel written specifically for my requirements.

However, if you feel the same way I did, perhaps the code is useful outside my walls.

I would be willing to put it out on GitHub and share it if you think it is a good basis for what you want.

Literally all of your requirements are the same as mine. We do media serving via Django for development, but we serve from a cookieless domain for production. In the future this might be a CDN, but for now is just a dedicated machine.

Static files are pre-processed, I currently do minification and gzipping (so Apache can serve pre-compressed files where appropriate). I also do an additional step, which is to combine javascript files that are used together into bundles.

This is all done by a management command that scans your templates. It finds instances of the {% media %} template tag and extracts the contents to build up a list of media files. Once it has this list, it groups files by type and by template. Then it groups all combinations of files that are used together (that don’t contain other smaller groups). These bundles are concatenated, and compiled.

The {% media %} then serves the bundle in production, or individual files in development mode. It also uses the .min flavor for production, but the non-minified version for development.

Deploying to the CDN is also handled by my media management command. So the process is:

python manage.py media –compress –minify –combine –deploy

Which preps and uploads everything to the CDN. Versioning is handled differently than you describe, but I like your method better (hash before filename which is ignored by media server).

I provided my email with this comment, and will monitor it for follow-ups. If you are interested, I will put this on GitHub and we can continue there.

IMHO, it would be better to fix the flaws/missing stuff in the existing apps if possible. There are already too many django assets management apps already!.

Using Django 1.3′s ‘collectstatic’ command with ‘–settings project.productionsettings’ allows for easy upload of static files to S3 before I then push changes to the production server.

Invalidation/compilation is still an issue. Haven’t really used compilation/minification much, and I rename my css files when I update then to include the date/time in the file name – this is a bit of a pain.