Hacker News Reader

Comment by elithrar | Hacker News Reader

> (there still isn't a sprockets-esque one-catch-all solution for django like in the rails world)

This is definitely a little frustrating. I'd kill for a solution that handles minification, versioning & can upload to S3/etc. You can pass things through boto to get to s3, but the rest requires a bit of fiddling.

I've seen a few solutions that come close, but then they have extremely odd versioning systems. I should just fork something so I can add an ISO8601 timestamp to my CSS & JS; which I like because having granular dates helps when debugging front-end issues.

View on HN

> I'd kill for a solution

Would you code for one? I, too, am sorry that we don't have a thing like asset pipeline. I'm pretty sure it would be welcome...

What have you tried? Because staticfiles + django-storages + django-compressor sounds like it can handle that use case.

I'm using exactly that setup and it does work, it just took me many hours and over 100 lines of custom storages + settings code to get it working.

I had to solve issues with custom domains, HTTPS, gzip, separate media/static files buckets, and storages/compressor not playing nicely together in general.

I have been developing with rails for a couple years, though I am comfortable with python I've never touched django because I haven't had to and one thing I will say is that the rails asset pipeline documentation is something I constantly return to. The asset pipeline provides a lot of functionality but not a lot of simplicity or management of complexity. If what you wish you had from rails is the asset pipeline you are either either an expert with with rails api or you are seeing things greener on the other side of the fence.

I don't mean to insult the asset pipeline, it provides a lot. But it definitely doesn't save you hours. Out of the box the asset pipeline is great for all the things that come for free but if you are doing a lot of development in the framework you probably return to the asset pipeline documentation on a regular basis. And I consider time spent in documentation a negative compared to time finding your own solution if the API is not intuitive and you find yourself consistently returning to the docs about similar problems. And let me tell you, plenty of my fellow Rails devs have said to me they also regularly return to the asset pipeline docs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com