Static version

This is a simple django utility that adds a version number to static files with a custom templatetag and context_processor. The version number is pulled from the django settings. The motivating use case was cache busting in CloudFront, we will simple bump up the version number on redeploy to invalidate static files.

How to use

• Install this package.

pip install django-static-version

• Add the setting for STATIC_VERSION.

STATIC_VERSION="1.0.1"

• Add the context processor in settings. This adds the setting above to the request context.

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': {
            'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.debug',
                'django.template.context_processors.request',
                'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
                'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
                'static_version.context_processors.static_urls'
            ],
        },
    },
]

• Use the custom filter or tag to add the version number to url query strings. The filter version is available as follows:

{{ "http://fake.com/"|version:static_version }}

The above code block will add our version number, 1.0.1, as the query string ?v=1.0.1 to the end of the url http://fake.com/ resulting in http://fake.com/?v=1.0.1

Alternately we can use the custom template tag static_version.

{% static_version 'bogus.jpg' %}

The above code will pull the version from the context and append it to the url returned by the built-in static tag and append the version number as above. This will result in /static/bogus.jpg?v=1.2 if your static root is /static/.

Tests

To run tests you simple run django-admin with the test_settings file

django-admin.py test --settings=test_settings