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meeb / django-distill

Minimal configuration static site generator for Django
MIT License
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Why are 'admin' and 'grapelli' excluded from the static files copy? #40

Closed mozz100 closed 3 years ago

mozz100 commented 3 years ago

I am really liking django-distill for a hobby project of mine. Spent quite a while wondering why, after I had run collectstatic and then run distill-local, the static files for every application except admin were ending up in my target directory.

I now see that admin and grappelli are hard-coded in as exclusions - https://github.com/meeb/django-distill/blob/master/django_distill/renderer.py#L229

How come these are excluded? The comments in the file don't help me understand. If there is no reason, I'll happily try and submit a pull request that stops it happening. If there is a good reason, I'll submit a pull request that mentions it in the documentation!

meeb commented 3 years ago

This is because when you build a static site in the typical use case for django-distill you would have the admin area to make the admin function locally to add content but the admin static files would serve no purpose on the actual site you want to deploy.

You would run collectstatic which would copy over all the required static files for the site as well as a bunch of unused admin files to your static directory. The distill-local and distill-publish commands had the admin and grapelli (a popular extension for the Django admin which uses its own directory) directories ignored so you don't upload a bunch of relatively pointless (in most cases) static files to your live site.

Is there a use case where you actually want to keep the static admin files and publish the admin images, CSS and so on to your static site? I'm happy to patch it to be a config option if there is a reasonable use case to keep them post static site generation, otherwise, you're welcome to submit a doc update to announce this behavior more publicly.

Cheers!

mozz100 commented 3 years ago

My use case is: I have a django site at ‘app.dev-esc.com’. (heroku, so I’m trying to avoid running python to serve static files).

It has its own static files needs, plus I have a static website (the “landing page” stuff) at ‘www.dev-esc.com’

I’ve really benefitted from django-distill because my website just drops out when I run the command. Push the .html files to s3, done. And so do all the static files, so I can just set ‘STATIC_URL’ to something beginning ‘https://www.dev-esc.com’ and everything works.

Everything except my admin site, that is!

It’s not too hard to add an extra ‘cp -r’ into my script. I just lost time working out what was special about ‘admin’.

I think, since I’ve already got my workaround, just mentioning ‘admin’ and ‘grappelli’ in the docs will help others.

meeb commented 3 years ago

I'll add a config tweak that defaults to the current behaviour but allows you to disable ignoring the admin dir. It's a reasonable request and not a big patch. Glad you find django-distill useful!

Just curious, do you use the distill-publish feature? Or push your files to S3 some other way?

meeb commented 3 years ago

setting settings.DISTILL_SKIP_ADMIN_DIRS = False once a new release is up should do what you want. README updated to match.

meeb commented 3 years ago

This patch is in the latest 2.5 release available on Pypi now. pip install -U django-distill to get it.

Thanks for your suggestion and input to the project.