django static files versioning

Question

I\'m working on some universal solution for problem with static files and updates in it.

Example: let\'s say there was site with /static/styles.css file - a

Answer 1

Django 1.7 added ManifestStaticFilesStorage, a better alternative to CachedStaticFilesStorage that doesn't use the cache system and solves the problem of the hash being computed at runtime.

Here is an excerpt from the documentation:

CachedStaticFilesStorage isn’t recommended – in almost all cases ManifestStaticFilesStorage is a better choice. There are several performance penalties when using CachedStaticFilesStorage since a cache miss requires hashing files at runtime. Remote file storage require several round-trips to hash a file on a cache miss, as several file accesses are required to ensure that the file hash is correct in the case of nested file paths.

To use it, simply add the following line to settings.py:

STATICFILES_STORAGE = 'django.contrib.staticfiles.storage.ManifestStaticFilesStorage'

And then, run python manage.py collectstatic; it will append the MD5 to the name of each static file.