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

The major advantage of this solution: you dont have to modify anything in the templates.

This will add the build version into the STATIC_URL, and then the webserver will remove it with a Rewrite rule.

settings.py

# build version, it's increased with each build
VERSION_STAMP = __versionstr__.replace(".", "")
# rewrite static url to contain the number
STATIC_URL = '%sversion%s/' % (STATIC_URL, VERSION_STAMP)

So the final url would be for example this:

/static/version010/style.css

And then Nginx has a rule to rewrite it back to /static/style.css

location /static {
    alias /var/www/website/static/;
    rewrite ^(.*)/version([\.0-9]+)/(.*)$ $1/$3;
}